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ARMS AND THE RACE 



ARMS AND THE RACE 

THE FOUNDATIONS 
OF ARMY REFORM 



BY 

R. M. JOHNSTON 

Assistant Professor of Modern History in 

Harvard University and Lecturer 

at the U. S. Army War 

College, Washington 




NEW YORK 

THE CENTURY CO. 

1915 






^^A 



Copyright, 1915, by 
The Century Co. 



Published, April, 191S 



/&0 



CI.A:i97741 



APR 27 1915 



Irs 



To 

HON. ELIHU ROOT, 

at one time Secretary of War and Reformer 

of the United States Army. 



PREFACE 

In one way this book is an outcome of 
the war in Europe. Yet the opinions 
put forward are not the sudden crea- 
tions of an overheated imagination. 
These opinions are based on historical 
study, and have found written or spoken 
form more than once in recent years for 
small audiences of special interests. 
There is little that is new here, save the 
appeal to a wider audience, and the 
piecing together by the light of recent 
events of a number of things which at 
first may seem unrelated, yet which ir- 
refutably connect Marlborough and 
Frederick the Great with the present 
secretary of war of the United States! 

It has been distasteful to have to 



PREFACE 

designate Powers like Japan and Ger- 
many. A rhetorical veil might have 
been spread over them, and I might 
have referred continuously to "a 
great Asiatic Power," or "a militarist 
state in Europe." On the whole it did 
not appear worth while. In fact it 
seemed to vitiate fundamentally the 
position here taken up, which is to dis- 
cuss a vital national problem in the most 
direct and precise way possible, avoid- 
ing the vague generalities with which 
the public must by now be quite 
satiated. What is said of Germany, of 
Japan, and of other Powers, implies no 
unfriendliness, merely an attempt to 
state facts, sometimes unpleasant, as 
accurately as possible. 

I must further explain that I have all 
through put to one side as much as I 
could the question of the navy. Yet the 



PREFACE 

problem of national defense is essen- 
tially a mixed one. But the fact is that 
we have a navy, and have not an army ; 
and until we have an army no correct 
adjustment of these questions is pos- 
sible. I have therefore confined myself 
as far as possible to the elements or 
foundations of our military problem. 

National armament is rapidly becom- 
ing a party question. One who ap- 
proaches the matter as a student cannot 
but regret this, because the facts are so 
important to the country as a whole. 
It is in this spirit that they are put for- 
ward; and it may be added that noth- 
ing here stated is drawn from sources 
not wholly accessible to the public. 
The opinions expressed are personal 
and not in any appreciable sense the 
result of consultation with others. 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I ARMIES IN THE EIGHTEENTH 

CENTURY 3 

II THE ART OF WAR n 

III THE NATIONAL ARMY 41 

IV NATIONAL MILITARY POLICIES . 63 
V KRUPPISM AND DISARMAMENT . 93 

VI EUROPE— ASIA— AMERICA . . .119 

VII MILITARY EXPERIENCES OF THE 

UNITED STATES 145 

VIII OUR NATIONAL DEFENSE POLICY 170 

IX ORGANIZATION 199 



ARMS AND THE RACE 



ARMS AND THE RACE 

CHAPTER I 

ARMIES IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

AT the epoch, not so very remote, of 
the Declaration of American In- 
dependence, armies were viewed differ- 
ently from to-day. With some reserva- 
tions as to the British army, every 
armed force was regarded as an essen- 
tial prerogative and instrument of a 
monarch. It belonged to him in a per- 
sonal and exclusive sense, as an unques- 
tioned privilege. It was therefore, in 
the last analysis, the foundation of the 
established order of things in Europe; 
incidentally, it was an instrument for 
territorial acquisition. 



ARMS AND THE RACE 

But, as the public saw things, the con- 
stant factor was tacitly accepted, while 
its incident appeared the chief matter. 
Autocratic monarchy was reckoned a 
divine ordinance and hardly worth dis- 
cussing, while interest centered in mili- 
tary activities provoked by far less im- 
portant matters, ranging all the way 
from the point of honor of the sover- 
eign to the economic alvantage of the 
nation as a whole. 

Take the Bourbons in 1781, the year 
of Yorktown and of Necker's Compte 
Rendu, Up to that time it had never 
occurred to any one in France that the 
Bourbon accounts or the Bourbon army 
concerned any one but the monarch. 
His tax-raised revenue was his own and 
beyond the range of investigation in the 
same sense as the income of any private 
individual. And from this revenue he 

4 



ARMIES IN 18TH CENTURY 

maintained, at what was thought of as 
his personal expense, just what number 
of soldiers he saw fit. Even though 
financial chaos and bankruptcy threat- 
ened, even though the American war 
was costing enormous sums, no criticism 
was offered until in that year, 1781, 
Necker, on being dismissed from office, 
issued his epoch-making Compte 
Rendu, It was a halting, incomplete, 
inaccurate attempt to state the financial 
situation of the kingdom. The ques- 
tion was now raised: Is finance royal 
or national? The Estates General re- 
plied eight years later by a decree that 
pledged the national credit for the na- 
tional debt. 

No finances, no army. The nation- 
alization of the one inevitably resulted 
in the nationalization of the other. The 
French army, long unpaid and in the 



ARMS AND THE RACE 

hands of a kindly and unenergetic mon- 
arch, failed to maintain the old order in 
July, 1789, and a year later found itself 
under a new allegiance: to the Nation, 
the Law, and the King. This was per- 
haps the decisive act of the French 
Revolution. But the public missed its 
full significance, still accustomed to the 
superficial view that an army was for 
the most part concerned with external 
war, whether of ambition or of economic 
interest. 

The army of the Bourbons was fairly 
representative of the European armies 
of that time. The King of Prussia, the 
Emperor, the King of Sardinia, the Re- 
public of Venice, the King of Spain, 
the Russian Tsar, all maintained armies 
of the same general type. And as these 
armies were thought of in their personal 
relations to a sovereign, it followed that 

6 



ARMIES IN 18TH CENTURY 

a soldier's qualification was almost 
wholly disconnected with the place of 
his birth. A soldier was a professional 
man who served wherever he found good 
pay and conditions; and a Swiss infan- 
tryman might hesitate as to whether to 
enlist with the King of France, the King 
of Naples, or the Pope, very much as a 
German chemist might hesitate to-day 
as to whether to seek a job in Lanca- 
shire, in Massachusetts, or in Nor- 
mandy. Switzerland bred as good sol- 
diers as were to be found in Europe; 
they could command high pay in any 
capital. Hesse was turned into the 
most productive of soldier farms by her 
thrifty electors, who took to the lucra- 
tive business of battalion contractors. 
As the army of Louis XVI marched on 
Paris in July, 1789, its heads of columns 
were not French; they were formed by 

7 



ARMS AND THE RACE 

such regiments as Nassau, Royal-Et- 
ranger, Esterhazy, Diesbach, Royal- 
Allemand, Reinach, Royal-Cravate; 
while the general in command was a 
Swiss. The Duke of Brunswick's col- 
umns in 1792 were not appreciably 
more foreign, and were viewed by the 
people of Paris much as their monarch's 
army had been viewed three years 
earlier. 

It must not be supposed, however, 
that eighteenth-century armies in Con- 
tinental Europe were purely profes- 
sional and non-national. It is merely 
a matter of emphasis. For if one were 
considering the question in close detail, 
it would be necessary to dwell on the 
militia organizations that were called on 
to play a part occasionally^ as in France 
and Prussia. Again, levies of an even 
more primitive description, such as those 

8 



ARMIES IN 18TH CENTURY 

of the Hungarian horse, tended to give 
war at times a more national character. 
But these were not the outstanding 
facts. Speaking broadly, an army be- 
longed to its monarch, and the soldier 
was a professional expert, and often, 
non-national. 

Just as the army belonged to the mon- 
arch, so did the regiment belong to its 
colonel, and the company to its captain. 
But here we come to a matter in which 
variation was great among the different 
armies. Improvements were being 
made in this system which was, on the 
whole, a pernicious survival from the 
seventeenth century. It will be stated, 
therefore, in a purely formal sense, and 
more to give an impression of the views 
of the epoch than to cover conditions ex- 
isting at any one place and time. 

A regiment or a company was a ben- 

9 



ARMS AND THE RACE 

efice in very much the same sense as a 
bishopric or deanery. The king paid 
the colonel so much for his regiment; 
the colonel paid the captain so much for 
his company. At each of these steps 
profits were made; in fact, the whole 
business of war and army management 
was full of petty fees and profits, so 
that the term professional soldier was, 
even in that sense, entirely justified. 
The emoluments, like in most profes- 
sions, went to those nearest the top of 
the ladder ; so that it paid to buy a posi- 
tion higher up, and a complicated sys- 
tem of purchase of commissions crept 
in, which in the English army survived 
to within half a century of our own 
time. 

Under these conditions a commission 
as an officer was naturally enough a 
privilege reserved to men of rank. As 

10 



ARMIES IN 18TH CENTURY 

the king owned the army, so did the 
aristocracy monopolize the commissions. 
In France, four quarterings of nobiUty 
were necessary for holding officers' 
rank ; and an able soldier but a plebeian 
like Jourdan might distinguish himself 
pre-eminently, as he did in the trenches 
at Yorktown, and yet remain a sergeant. 
Under the Republic, the same man 
might rise to command a great national 
army and win one of the decisive vic- 
tories of European history ; as Jourdan 
did at Fleurus in 1794. At the time of 
the War of the Spanish Succession the 
HohenzoUerns were not above contract- 
ing out their army, under the command 
of Crown Prince Frederick William, to 
the Allies. The Elector of Hesse, on a 
smaller scale, went into the same sort of 
business. As late as 1855 we find Eng- 
land attempting to hire the Sardinian 

11 



ARMS AND THE RACE 

army. On a smaller scale, colonels are 
military contractors. They supply the 
king with a regiment. It is made up of 
professional soldiers ; and is recruited by 
other professional soldiers who drift in, 
or by new recruits who soon learn to 
conform with the high standard they 
see all about them. War decimates 
these regiments; but it also ravages the 
country and turns peasants to soldier- 
ing, who come in as recruits. 

The expansion of armies for war 
emergencies was a slow process and not 
at all comparable with the modern sys- 
tem founded by Scharnhorst. Larger 
sums were made available with which to 
enter into more contracts with suppliers 
of troops. Old and new hands were at- 
tracted by the prospect of fighting, and 
especially of the incidents of fighting. 
From the French army statistics the fol- 
ia 



ARMIES IN 18TH CENTURY 

lowing figures will show the nominal 
numbers of the Bourbon army in alter- 
nate years of peace and war. 

Peace War 
1726 160,000 1733 205,000 

1734 303,000 

1739 200,000 1742 400,000 

1749 140,000 1756 290,000 

1759 330,000 

1775 128,000 

The cost of this army, so far as the im- 
perfect figures will serve, appears to 
have oscillated from about 35 to 168 
miUions of francs. In 1775 the figure 
is 98 millions. 

Turning to England we note differ- 
ences. The army was broken in the 
monarch's hand as early as the middle 
of the seventeenth century. And the 
struggle of the Commonwealth against 

13 



ARMS AND THE RACE 

the Crown was maintained by the same 
iron stock which in that epoch succeeded 
in colonizing New England. When the 
Stuarts were driven out, the question of 
the army took on a new aspect. The 
sovereigns that followed were far more 
disposed to follow constitutional 
courses. England had become in- 
volved in continental wars with Hol- 
land, with Spain, with France. She 
struggled for commercial advantages, 
and the control of the sea; she resisted 
the planting of a strong power among 
the inlets and havens that faced the 
Thames from Antwerp to Dunkirk. 
Such a policy required an army, and 
therefore England reluctantly, suspi- 
ciously, entrusted William III and his 
successors with the forces that appeared 
to be called for by the passing circum- 
stances. 

U 



ARMIES IN 18TH CENTURY 

Although the British monarchs of the 
eighteenth century maintained an army 
similar in many ways to those of the 
Continental States, there were at bot- 
tom important differences. Financial 
control reposed in the House of Com- 
mons from the year 1689. The King's 
power had already in large measure 
passed to the Cabinet. Yet the army 
was viewed with jealousy, and the mili- 
tia, successor of the older train-bands 
that had fought for the Commonwealth, 
was viewed as the national as opposed 
to the royal force. The Tory country 
gentlemen, none too zealous on behalf 
of the Hanoverian dynasty, officered the 
militia. It was not an efficient force 
even after some training as at the time 
of the Seven Years' War and at the 
time of Napoleon; but it long continued 
immensely popular as the hypothetical 

15 



ARMS AND THE RACE 

bulwark of the British constitution 
against a hypothetical tyrant. 

These ideas evoked a natural echo 
from America. When the colonists 
revolted from the mother country noth- 
ing proved more distasteful for them 
than to carry their decision to its logical 
conclusion, the formation of an army. 
The armed farmers of Lexington were 
well enough, but when it became neces- 
sary to supplement their well-meant but 
imtutored and sporadic efforts by the 
formation of regular Continental 
troops, enthusiasm waned fast. Some 
aspects of the War of Independence 
will be noticed in a later chapter. For 
the present it will suffice to say that at 
the close of the war and during the 
period that followed, American senti- 
ment towards the army reflected pretty 
closely the conditions that surrounded 

16 



ARMIES IN 18TH CENTURY 

armies in Europe. It was natural, in 
fact inevitable, that a standing army 
should be thought of as an engine of 
tyranny, and more or less useless for 
any other purpose. Had not the Eng- 
lish sovereigns from Charles I to 
George III, for a century and a half, 
employed armed force to assert their 
will against their subjects? Was not 
an army by the nature of military com- 
mand an aristocratic institution? 

As a result of these wholly justified 
prejudices the United States proved on 
the whole ungrateful in the treatment 
awarded to the brave men who gave 
their blood for independence. Al- 
though Washington plainly declared 
and frequently repeated that the militia 
had actually done more harm than good 
to the cause, the second clause of the 
Constitution was drawn as follows: 

17 



ARMS AND THE RACE 

"A well regulated militia being nec- 
essary to the security of a free state, the 
right of the people to keep and bear 
arms shall not be infringed." It is 
needless to point out that this main- 
tained the English distinction between 
the constitutional and the royal force. 
Another aspect of the matter is echoed 
by such provisos as the one still skulk- 
ing in the Massachusetts constitution, 
whereby officers must be elected by their 
men. By such means democracy might 
be strengthened; and tyranny resisted. 
Yet it will be seen later that, as times 
changed, other and unforeseen dangers 
just as serious as these might be run 
into. 

The land army, then, was viewed as 
an instrument of tyranny ; the sea army 
was in different case. And the sea 
army was perhaps the more potent fac- 

18 



ARMIES IN 18TH CENTURY 

tor in the intercourse of nations. "Ad- 
miral Mahan has laid down in terms 
that are perhaps too sweeping an argu- 
ment for the supremacy of sea power 
over land power. It is true to say that 
the factor represented by sea power had 
been much neglected by historians be- 
fore he so brilliantly called attention to 
it. But it is also true to say that the 
decisiveness of sea power has not been 
quite so constant as he claims, and that 
it must vary in every conflict with the 
general situation of the combatants. 
Obviously, a struggle between Servia 
and Bulgaria might not be in any way 
affected by sea power, while one be- 
tween England and Germany must be 
so inevitably. 

"But Admiral Mahan has rarely been 
happier than when pointing out how un- 
emphatic, subtle, and underlying is the 

19 



ARMS AND THE RACE 

influence of sea power. And there lies 
one of its chief differences from land 
power. From 1805 to 1812 the world 
viewed Napoleon as a giant and Eng- 
land as a pigmy; yet, if sea power was 
really more decisive than land power, 
then in reality the case was the opposite. 
The truth lies, of course, in Admiral 
Mahan's observation that the impres- 
sion and effect of sea power are less ob- 
vious, less insistent." ^ 

Now from the beginning of the seven- 
teenth century to the present day Eng- 
land has maintained a sea militarism of 
an extreme character. For it has dur- 
ing most of this time rejected equality 
with its opponents and attempted, with 
general success, to maintain superiority 
and supremacy. Yet this sea power, 

1 Johnston, "Three Hundred Years of War." Irir 
fantry Journal, November, 1914. 

20 



ARMIES IN 18TH CENTURY 

that for a century and a half dominated 
all the world and created the greatest 
empire yet seen, never provoked the 
fears and jealousy that were felt for the 
eighteenth-century army. For a fleet 
arises from commerce. Its home is the 
ocean. It neither helps the despot nor 
threatens the citizen. And in the atti- 
tude of the American citizen of the 
present day towards fleets and armies, 
these old eighteenth-century ideas and 
prejudices are still quite apparent. 
We put our hands in our pockets with- 
out too much reluctance, with some rel- 
ish even, to build such a nice mechanical 
toy as a dreadnought. — But a regiment 
of soldiers? — Never! 



n 



CHAPTER II 

THE ART OF WAR 

WAR as an art reaches its apogee, 
in modem times, with the eight- 
eenth century. Marlborough marks the 
beginning, Frederick the middle, Bona- 
parte the close of the epoch. Nowa- 
days, in western Europe at all events, 
war is no longer an art; it is rather 
an economic function. The nation is 
armed and crowded to the frontier while 
an economic adjustment of vast propor- 
tions supplies its thousand needs, and 
attempts to maintain some sort of equi- 
hbrium behind. A hundred years ago, 
things were very different. 

The eighteenth-century army, as an 
22 



THE ART OF WAR 

instrument in the hands of its general, 
may be compared to the eighteenth-cen- 
tury orchestra. Starting on a basis of 
string instruments, the woods were 
gradually developed from the time of 
Montaverde to Mozart, while with 
Beethoven, at the close of the century, 
the brass comes into its own, and the 
three great parts of the orchestra, 
amply developed, give the composer 
ample means for deploying the re- 
sources of his art. A somewhat similar 
evolution took place with the three great 
arms of the modern army: infantry, 
cavalry, artillery. 

Infantry, before the eighteenth cen- 
tury, was normally made up in varying 
proportions of pikemen and musketeers. 
The pikemen held off the cavalry, or 
charged an enemy in position. The 
musketeers held the opposing cavalry 

2S 



ARMS AND THE RACE 

at distance or occupied woods, ditches 
and flank positions, and tended to de- 
velop a direct attack by fire. At the 
turn of the century a shortened pike 
shaft was stuck into the muzzle of a 
musket and then developed into a socket 
bayonet, so that the pikeman and mus- 
keteer were amalgamated. A unit of 
say 300 pikemen and 300 musketeers 
was converted by this invention into a 
unit of 600 pikemen and 600 musketeers. 
In other words, the value of infantry 
was numerically doubled.^ 

In Marlborough's campaigns during 
the Wars of the Spanish Succession, 
cavalry and infantry were of about 
equal value in the shock of battle, and 
the use of cavalry in the front line is dis- 
tinctive of this great master of the art 

1 An amusing illustration of our consistently anti- 
quated notions of war is that so late as 1812, the 15th 
Infantry was for a time armed with pikes! 

24 



THE ART OF WAR 

of war and of his epoch. But infantry 
was rapidly acquiring the predominance 
it has since retained on the battlefield. 
Material improvements in the musket 
made the arm more effective. And the 
increasing rigor of drill and precision 
in manoeuvring, especially in Prussia, 
soon relegated cavalry to a secondary, 
though still highly important part. 
The artillery arm was as yet of little 
account for field operations. 

Frederick the Great brought the in- 
fantry arm to a point it has not since 
surpassed. It could maintain tactical 
cohesion under a terrific fire, on the wid- 
est front, and in complicated forma- 
tions. No infantry ever equaled it in 
its power of forcing a decision of the 
combat by manoeuvring against a given 
point and under the most violent condi- 
tions. To understand this better it 

25 



ARMS AND THE RACE 

may be as well to clear away a misun- 
derstanding widespread among popular 
lecturers as to the relation between im- 
proved armaments and destruction of 
life in battle. 

As a general proposition it may be 
laid down that the less destructive the 
weapon the greater will be the loss of 
life ; and the history of war gives ample 
confirmation to the theory.^ Arm two 
groups of six men with knives, and tell 
them to get a decision: the loss of life 
will inevitably be heavy, and the de- 
cision rapid. Arm the same groups 
each with a quick firing gun: the loss 
of life will in nine cases out of ten be 
smaller, and the decision may be long 

2 Loss of life per hour of fighting in battle de- 
creases steadily from about the middle of the 
eighteenth century to the present time. No exact sta- 
tistical formula for this can be given, but in a rough 
sense it is a decrease of something like 8 per cent, to 
an eighth of 1 per cent. 

26 



THE ART OF WAR 

postponed. With weak arms the de- 
cision must be sought at short range 
and a system of discipMne and tactics 
must be evolved that will meet this ne- 
cessity. With powerful weapons the 
emphasis changes; it becomes increas- 
ingly necessary to protect human life 
instead of risking it; tactics are modi- 
fied, distances are increased, and loss 
decreases correspondingly. The illu- 
sion is widespread, nevertheless, that 
modern weapons cause greater loss of 
life than those used in earlier days. 
This illusion proceeds from various 
causes. The incident of a local surprise 
where the modern weapon does its de- 
structive work, is extended to represent 
the norm of the whole shock between 
two armies, which it does not. The il- 
lusion also proceeds from ignoring the 
relation of tactics to armaments and 

27 



ARMS AND THE RACE 

from the magnifying effect of the mod- 
ern press. The fact remains that a 
blunderbuss, in the evolution of war, is 
a more effective weapon than a high- 
power, small-bore rifle, because the 
former was used at ten feet, where the 
latter is used at a thousand yards. 

The musket in Frederick's day was 
already capable of discharging several 
shots a minute, but it lacked power and 
accuracy. Although it might range a 
good deal beyond 200 yards, yet that 
distance was generally regarded as the 
practical limit of the field of fire within 
which the decision could be reached. 
Every twenty yards advance within 
that distance was a distinct gain in fire 
power. The ultimate aim of the com- 
mander was to obtain so close a posi- 
tion and to deliver so smashing a dis- 
charge as to break the opposing line at 

28 



THE ART OF WAR 

one blow. Such was the * 'perfect vol- 
ley" on the plains of Abraham in 1759. 
If volleys could be delivered either by 
units or by the whole line, as at Leu- 
then, from an enfilading position, so 
much the better. 

Under these circumstances it was 
necessary to bring the infantry into bat- 
tle in such a way as to develop the great- 
est possible quantity of fire at the short- 
est possible range and at the most favor- 
able angle possible. This was effected 
by deploying extended lines of infan- 
try, drilled to fear the sergeant who 
walked behind stick in hand more than 
the enemy's guns; and manoeuvring 
with such rapidity and accuracy as to be 
able to snatch any favorable opportu- 
nity for gaining the enfilading position 
while maintaining the general align- 
ment. Frederick was extraordinarily 

29 



ARMS AND THE RACE 

successful in persuading his soldiers to 
"respecter le baton," as he pleasantly 
put the dilemma between facing the 
bullet or the cat o' nine tails. At 
Leuthen, at Rossbach, he demonstrated 
what pulverizing results a small but 
highly drilled professional army could 
obtain through the application of those 
parade-ground manoeuvers of which he 
held the secret.^ 

Frederick generally strove for a 
pitched battle, or quick results. The size 
of his army, the nature of his manoeu- 
vers, and the character of the ground 
in the country he fought over, all helped 
to make central control of the army 
and direct supervision by the general 
possible. Infantry though broken up 
into battalions, and even on occasion 

3 Frederick's peace manoeuvers were carried out se- 
cretly behind a cordon of pickets. 

30 



THE ART OF WAR 

into larger groups, was handled as a 
whole. The subordinate generals and 
officers were more concerned with main- 
taining alignments and relative posi- 
tions and directions than with utilizing 
broken ground, which was avoided, or 
exercising any initiative. The preoc- 
cupation of the military art was tactical 
in the strictest sense. 

Soon after the close of the Seven 
Years' War came important modifica- 
tions in the artillery arm, which hitherto 
had lagged far behind the others. 
These reforms took place in France, 
and the officer whose name is most 
closely associated with them was de 
Gribeauval. He succeeded in reduc- 
ing the weight of the gun, thereby in- 
creasing its mobility and rendering it 
capable of following infantry over 
broken ground. He gave it greater 

31 



ARMS AND THE RACE 

muzzle velocity, while reducing the 
charge; in fact, almost made a new 
weapon of it. At the same time he and 
others were experimenting with grape, 
which became more destructive. These 
changes brought the artillery arm up to 
the level of the other two, and by dis- 
arranging the balance then existing 
brought about a change in theoretical 
tactics; in fact, in the whole theory of 
war. General du Teil was teaching 
these theories at the artillery school at 
Auxonne at the time when the French 
Revolution broke out, and young Bona- 
parte, a sub-lieutenant of artillery, was 
quartered there and became one of his 
favorite students. 

The new theory ran along the follow- 
ing lines. Guns can now follow the in- 
fantry fight and shift position rapidly. 
They can also deliver a greater volume 

3a 



THE ART OF WAR 

of fire at increased ranges. That being 
so, if operations are being conducted in 
country broken by natural obstacles, 
numerous positions can be found where 
a few guns supported by detachments 
of the other arms, can hold at bay large 
numbers of deployed infantry. Again, 
if one could concentrate, by good use of 
ground, the fire of a number of guns 
on a given point of the enemy's line, 
then a breach might be made, much as 
in the attack of a fortress, and a vic- 
tory won. Napoleon acted on this 
theory in the great grape shot attacks 
of his later campaigns ; and even before 
Napoleon, Carnot adopted the theory 
of the new school by breaking up his 
armies into divisions of the three arms, 
self-sustaining because of the increased 
value and radius of fire.* 

4 The French began experimenting with divisional 
organizations some years before this. 

33 



ARMS AND THE RACE 

Every increase of the power of the 
defensive has presented the recurring 
problem: how, then, is a decision to be 
got? Napoleon found an answer. If 
the shock was to be less easy to force, 
less decisive, spread over more ground 
and more time, then could not tactics 
be supplemented by strategy? Could 
not an army be so handled as to obtain 
an advantage which might prove deci- 
sive even before the tactical shock oc- 
curred ? 

"Marengo illustrates admirably the 
strategic conception that overcomes 
tactical disability. Between the two 
armies that met on that field there was 
no comparison in point of discipline and 
of manoeuvring power in terms of 
minor tactics. The French army was 
wretchedly inadequate to the business 
in hand. A large proportion of the in- 

34 



THE ART OF WAR 

fantry was green. Some of the men 
had not even received muskets, while 
many had had muskets dealt out to them 
on the march through Switzerland and 
were only just beginning to get correct 
notions as to which end should be 
pointed at the enemy. As soon as 
Austrians and French were fairly de- 
ployed face to face the result, tactically, 
was not in doubt for an instant. And 
it was only because the Austrians, su- 
perior also in numbers, carelessly blun- 
dered after apparently winning an easy 
victory, only because Desaix and Kel- 
lermann struck an unexpected, clever, 
and lucky blow, that Melas did not 
camp on the battlefield. But the re- 
markable thing was that all this mat- 
tered veiy little, because Bonaparte had 
got a decisive strategic result before he 
even attempted to get a tactical one. 

35 



ARMS AND THE RACE 

"The strategic manoeuver of Napo- 
leon was far more akin to the concep- 
tions of von Moltke than to those of 
Frederick. The disposition of troops 
in France and Italy for a strategic pur- 
pose; the rapid march to Milan; the 
fan-like spread of the French divisions 
to cover all roads whereby Melas could 
get back to his line of communications; 
the occupation of the Stradella Pass, 
easy of defense but with no ground 
really suited to the deployment of an 
army; all of these were features that 
belonged to an era of greatly increased 
power in fire arms, of the fractioning 
of armies into self-sustaining parts. 
For these reasons the strategic advan- 
tage which Napoleon obtained by the 
rapidity of his concentration and pre- 
liminary manoeuver was decisive, and a 
tactical set-back was not at all likely to 

36 



THE ART OF WAR 

prove serious with the ground and the 
strategic situation of the armies what 
they were." ^ 

We thus have a development of 
armaments, and a new theory of war to 
mark the close of the century. But 
this was not all, for the same epoch wit- 
nessed a large increase in the size of 
armies together with a lowering of the 
efficiency of the infantry arm. But this 
topic belongs to the next chapter, in 
which the displacement of professional 
by national armies will be discussed. 
For the present, we may say that under 
the new conditions Bonaparte showed 
a genius for war that raised him at the 
close of his first campaign to the select 
company of the great captains. War 
still remained an art. From his saddle 

5 Johnston, "What Could Napoleon Accomplish To- 
Day?'* Nineteenth Century, December, 1914. 

37 



ARMS AND THE RACE 

the commander could still follow the 
evolutions of his army on the field, 
could control all its divisions, could ring 
the changes on all the combinations of 
horse, foot, and guns. If the infantry 
was less steady, it was quicker in its 
movements; if the cavalry was less reg- 
ular, it had more initiative; while the 
guns were constantly gaining in impor- 
tance. "There is no natural order of 
battle," declared Napoleon. But out 
of the newborn confusion and scurry 
the Corsican's logical mind could al- 
ways evoke the massed blow or circling 
swoop that presaged the flight of the 
enemy. 

Let us sum up. The eighteenth cen- 
tury is the age of military despots, rul- 
ing great countries. But those coun- 
tries have not yet come to national con- 
sciousness and accept more or less the 

38 



THE ART OF WAR 

divine right of their rulers. Force is in 
an immediate sense the stabilizing me- 
dium of society; and force is concen- 
trated in the sovereign's hands. The 
professional army takes the natural 
enough mold of a caste. The aristocrat 
is the officer; and he commands a well- 
defined class of man, the professional 
soldier. Together they rise, before the 
outbreak of the Revolution, to an ex- 
traordinary pitch of professional at- 
tainment and courage; w^hile the art of 
wav develops the most severe contacts 
and hazardous adjustments. Craft 
and science and intrepidity in bound- 
less measure are to be found in the men 
who reach the pinnacle of the most ter- 
rifying of the arts. Marlborough at 
Blenheim, Frederick at Leuthen, 
Napoleon at Austerlitz, tasted in their 
supreme form the joy which primitive 

39 



ARMS AND THE RACE 

man feels in combat, but combat trans- 
formed into its most polished possibili- 
ties. The French Revolution was des- 
tined to change all that, to change war 
so profoundly that even the greatest of 
generals proved unable to keep up with 
the transformation. 



40 



CHAPTER III 

THE NATIONAL ARMY 

BY successive stages, between the 
14th of July, 1789, and the 14th 
of October, 1806, the professional army 
of the eighteenth century was shattered 
by the rising tide of nationalism. On 
the first of these dates the people of 
Paris imposed their will on Louis XVI, 
who withdrew his troops from their 
gates, and on the second the conscript 
army of France destroyed the splendid 
fighting machine which Frederick had 
bequeathed to his successors. After 
this, the professional army disappears 
in Continental Europe. 

When the French National Assem- 
41 



ARMS AND THE RACE 

bly took over the army from the King, 
the rank and file were abeady much de- 
morahzed. Pay was heavily in arrears ; 
mutiny was in the air; seditious ideas 
were being propagated. The Assem- 
bly completed the work by making it 
illegal under certain conditions for the 
soldier to obey his superior, and by sup- 
pressing the foundation of the whole 
edifice of the current infantry tactics, 
the cat o' nine tails. The soldier was 
now a citizen in the enjoyment of the 
rights of a free man, and he might not 
be subjected to punishments derogatory 
to his new-born privileges and dignity. 
All this was, of course, quite as it 
should be. But it had a drawback. 
The quality of the French army was 
reduced, its discipline was seriouslj^' af- 
fected. It became immensely more 
difiicult to bring infantry up to the tac- 

4^ 



THE NATIONAL ARMY 

tical shock, and that at the very moment 
when the increase in the intensity and 
range of fire apparently demanded of 
troops an even greater degree of energy 
and tactical cohesion than in the past. 
The upshot was that when the First 
Republic became involved in war with 
the rest of Europe, its armies proved 
much inferior to those of the Bourbon 
monarchy. 

How was it then that the Republic 
fought its way to eventual success, that 
it saved its existence at Valmy and 
Fleurus, and imposed its will on its 
enemies at Mantua, Zurich and Hohen- 
linden? There were four chief rea- 
sons: 1°. the artillery; 2°. the new art 
of war; 3°. the social revolution; 4°. 
numbers. Let us glance at each of 
these in turn. 

At Vahny, two days before the Re- 
43 



ARMS AND THE RACE 

public was proclaimed, the Duke of 
Brunswick apparently had the French 
army at his mercy; but the great con- 
centration of batteries along the French 
front made him hesitate and finally de- 
cline to attack. One of the decisive 
victories of history had been won at a 
cost to the victors of less than two per 
cent, in killed and wounded. The ex- 
cellence of the artillery, from which arm 
the greatest of French generals was 
soon to emerge, played a great part in 
all the campaigns that followed in stif- 
fening the armies of the Republic. 

When those armies had begun to 
find themselves, let us say towards the 
close of the year 1793, they revealed 
certain peculiarities, some defects and 
some qualities. For one thing, they 
were ragged and unkempt, inade- 
quately clothed and equipped. The 

44 



THE NATIONAL ARMY 

Government was bankrupt; transport 
and rations failed. What was an army 
to do under those circumstances? 
What the French army did was to neg- 
lect parade and appearances; to devote 
more time to marching and forestalling 
the enemy; and to live on the country. 
All this meant rapid movement and a 
greater capacity for obtaining strategic 
advantages, thereby balancing in a 
measure tactical weakness. 

But whatever strategical advantage 
an army may obtain, there always 
comes the moment when the tactical de- 
cision must be fought for. The artil- 
lery could not do the business alone. 
How was one to get the best results 
from the French infantry on the field? 
To deploy that infantry on a wide front 
developing its musketry fire to the full- 
est extent would clearly be useless 

45 



ARMS AND THE RACE 

against the more rigidly trained infan- 
try that would have to be faced. Even 
at Jena, in 1806, deployed French in- 
fantry could not stand against the 
Prussians when they met fairly face 
to face. Discipline had been low- 
ered far too much to leave the French 
on anything like equal terms at that 
game. If, however, battle were joined 
on ground that was fairly broken, then 
skirmishers and small columns, 
strongly backed by mobile guns and 
cavalry, might effect something. And 
the small column came into large use 
and typified better than anything else 
the changes brought about by the Rev- 
olution. 

A column of a half battalion was one 
of the easiest formations to teach a raw 
soldier; easiest in which to retain tacti- 
cal control or cohesion; easiest in which 

46 



THE NATIONAL ARMY 

to manoeuver with rapidity from one 
position to another.^ Then again, in 
this sort of formation, it was the head 
of the column that counted for every- 
thing. A dozen officers and non-com- 
missioned officers and a dozen brave 
soldiers in the lead might carry along 
several hundred skulkers and cowards 
in a dash on the enemy. Now the 
Revolution had ordained that its armies 
should be made up of a large undis- 
ciplined mass, inclined therefore to 
skulk, and of a small proportion of men 
before whom it had set the greatest of 
human prizes. The private soldier 
might rise to the highest command ; and 
he did. A sub-lieutenant of artillery 
became an emperor; a private dragoon 
became a king and so did a simple gren- 

1 Space forbids a sufficient explanation of the diffi- 
culties attending line manoeuvers of the Frederickian 
period, and of the questions of time involved. 

47 



ARMS AND THE RACE 

adier; several private soldiers became 
Marshals of France. These were the 
men who carried the tricolor at the 
heads of the charging columns, and 
gave the French armies, notwithstand- 
ing the skulkers, their irresistible qual- 
ity. It was the fanaticism of the social 
revolution. 

This fanaticism of the social revolu- 
tion took on an aspect which may be 
summed up in a word of much import 
for the evolution of armies in the nine- 
teenth century, the word initiative. 
Initiative in the general sense of the 
word was the bold individualism of the 
men who by their example lent force 
and coherence to the armed mob. It 
was the great quality of the Army of 
Italy in 1796; and it might have become 
in an organized form a great force in 
the armies of the Empire; we shall see 

48 



THE NATIONAL ARMY 

presently why things took a different 
turn. 

One more reason needs stating to ex- 
plain the victories of the armies of the 
Republic: they generally outnumbered 
their opponents, and it was as well, for 
they sometimes required a preponder- 
ance of two to one to succeed. If the 
nation could not be saved by the old 
army, then let every citizen arm him- 
self and fly to the frontier! The re- 
sponse to this appeal was excellent in 
1791, moderately good in 1792 and 
even in 1793. But after that, difficul- 
ties grew; until in 1798 the first real 
conscription law was passed. Under 
this system, which was soon copied 
throughout the Continent, the armed 
nation was deliberately substituted for 
the older standing army. Before ex- 
amining the institution at work during 

49 



ARMS AND THE RACE 

the following fifteen years, we may first 
note that the fundamental character 
of the change passed almost unnoticed. 
It was a time of stress and passion. 
The new France, stained with blood, 
tarnished with bankruptcy, desperately 
facing the brink of destruction, was 
driven to any and every means for pre- 
serving her hard-won institutions. So 
conscription passed as an emergency 
measure for strengthening the army, 
merely as an extreme means for meet- 
ing a ruinous situation. 

But what did conscription really sig- 
nify? Take the answer in terms reach- 
ing from the French measure of 1798 
to what we see in this year 1915. It 
meant substituting the ordinary citizen 
for the professional soldier; it meant 
sending up to the firing line not men 
ready and willing to face the supreme 

50 



THE NATIONAL ARMY 

risk but men for the most part with no 
such disposition, ordinary citizens, pro- 
fessional men, lawyers, merchants, art- 
ists, even in one country to-day, priests. 
It is a shocking thing that modern civ- 
ilization should arrive at such a system 
as that. Yet in the working of the 
system valid distinctions can be drawn, 
as will appear in later chapters. For 
there is a gulf between a State in which 
the conscript soldier can be spoken of as 
pulverfutter, food for cannon, and the 
State in which he is a neighbor among 
neighbors, armed for the defense of his 
home and with no aggressive intent. 

Let us turn once more to the art of 
war, and consider how these matters, 
particularly numbers, affected its con- 
duct. Bonaparte became master of 
France in the year following that in 
which conscription was established. 

51 



ARMS AND THE RACE 

In 1805 began the wars of the Empire, 
and by the following year a vast in- 
crease in the size of the French armies 
set in. Steadily they grew until in 
1812 Napoleon, whose first army had 
amounted to less than 50,000 men, 
found himself at the head of half a mil- 
lion. It is interesting to consider this 
fact in connection with two things: the 
generalship of Napoleon, and the 
growth of national araiies. 

With Napoleon what we find is this: 
He is unwilling to recognise that the 
growth of armies, and the widening of 
strategic and tactical areas, demand a 
system of command different from that 
which had obtained during all the cen- 
turies. He is further unwilling to 
recognise that the plan for employing 
a large national army demands a dif- 
ferent sort of reasoning from that for 

52 



THE NATIONAL ARMY 

employing a small professional one. 
And in his struggle against Russia he 
is half blind to the fact that even add- 
ing strategy to tactics does not cover 
the function of war, but that it may, 
under given circumstances, become a 
duel in terms of economic resources. 

It is sometimes difficult to disen- 
tangle in Napoleon what is logical from 
what is merely craving for power. 
Unity was one of these double-faced 
obsessions. There must be unity of 
command. There must never be two 
armies in the same field of operations. 
The first statement might, under con- 
ditions, be tiTie. The second could not 
remain true under the extension of war- 
fare then proceeding. More than one 
army has to be employed in the field of 
operations of 1805, Napoleon's and 
Massena's; more than one in 1809, 

53 



ARMS AND THE RACE 

Napoleon's and Prince Eugene's ; more 
than one in 1813. But he tries not to 
see the truth; he cHngs desperately to 
his old ideal of the hero-despot v/ho 
from the saddle controls the military 
drama in its entirety as it unfolds be- 
fore him. 

In 1812 he set out to defeat Russia 
by the sheer accumulation of numbers 
against her; just as de Gribeauval be- 
lieved in accimiulating fire and batter- 
ing a hole at a given point. But the 
scale is wholly unsuitable, and in more 
than one way. He writes to Davout: 
"The object of all my manoeuvers is to 
concentrate 400,000 men at a given 
point." Again a pure obsession, and 
hopeless in practice. For at that mo- 
ment he had before him two widely sep- 
arated Russian armies, in a vast theater 
of war of scantv resources, and those 

54< 



THE NATIONAL ARMY 

armies amounted one to 100,000 men, 
the other to 50,000 men. A concentra- 
tion of 400,000 men at either of these 
points, if feasible, was merely the grati- 
fication of an inordinate craving for 
mass and for power ; as a practical meas- 
ure it could only lead to the paralyzing 
of the army from undue concentration 
in a poor country, while the numbers 
were too large to serve any adequate 
purpose. 

Then again, following up the same 
line of thought, we find Napoleon at- 
tempting to handle the main army of 
invasion on a single line of supply. And 
that line of supply, overstrained by its 
burden, broke down at the very outset 
of the campaign. With von Moltke, 
a very different mode of thought would 
have prevailed. No attempt would 
have been made to concentrate against 

55 



ARMS AND THE RACE 

the Russian armies a larger force than 
one sufficient to defeat them. The 
army would have been broken up into 
several groups of quicker action be- 
cause smaller; and it would have been 
backed by troops of the second line to 
make secure the lines of communication 
and to obtain firm possession of the 
country behind the field army. 

If Napoleon displayed unwillingness 
to devise new methods to meet new 
conditions, the reason is easily found in 
his inordinate craving for power. He 
grasps, but does not construct. Long 
before armies had swollen to immense 
proportions, he had shown a jealous 
fear of entrusting power to others. 
Apart from Massena, Davout, Soult, 
Lannes, Murat, few of his marshals or 
generals ever knew their master's inten- 
tions. They feared, and obeyed orders 

56 



THE NATIONAL ARMY 

in a literal sense. Initiative was 
slowly and surely paralyzed, and that 
at the very time when the necessity for 
some means of coordinating the move- 
ments of greater armies over vast areas 
became more and more pressing. 

The Prussians, under the spur of 
their disasters, began learning at the 
point where Napoleon left off. Even 
before Jena they had begun to perceive 
that with increased armies something 
rather more elaborate than a one-man 
command was necessary for effective 
control. For many years there had 
been a staff, in the sense of a quarter- 
master's and an adjutant's office. To- 
wards the close of the eighteenth cen- 
tury this developed into a body of of- 
ficers trained, among other things, in 
reconnaissance duties and the guiding 
of troops. 

57 



ARMS AND THE RACE 

Von Massenbach, who was later 
Chief of Staff to Prince Holenlohe in 
the Jena campaign and earned the 
name of the *'evil genius of Prussia," 
initiated reforms just before the Jena 
campaign that were carried further by 
Scharnhorst in the years following that 
disaster. A staff corps on modern 
lines was developed, and so rapidly did 
it progress that one of the best German 
staff officers of recent times declared 
that "the work done by the Headquarter 
Staff of the Silesian Army [1813-14] 
may be taken as an example of effi- 
ciency even at the present day." ^ 
Officers were trained in the technical 
details of the control of armies during 
field operations. And while the topo- 
graphical work naturally plays a large 

2 Bronsart von Schellendorf, "Duties of the Gen- 
eral Staff." War Office, London. 

58 



THE NATIONAL ARMY 

part in the early history of this organi- 
zation, it is interesting to note from the 
earhest days the insistence on the 
higher education of army officers for 
field duties and on the fundamental im- 
portance of the Historical Section of 
the General Staff. 

Scharnhorst is probably less well 
known for his development of the Gen- 
eral Staff system, or system of army 
control by groups of experts, than by 
his organization of the new model 
Prussian army. By the treaty of Til- 
sit in 1807 Napoleon dictated to Prus- 
sia the reduction of her army to 42,000 
men and no more. Prussia was not 
prepared to accept her virtual relega- 
tion among the minor States, and deter- 
mined to regain her position among the 
nations. To effect this purpose an 
army of 42,000 men, whatever degree 

59 



ARMS AND THE RACE 

of perfection it might be brought to, 
was clearly useless. Numbers were 
necessary. The problem then was how, 
while keeping no more than 42,000 men 
with the colors, to be able to place a 
large army in the field in case of war. 

Schamhorst's solution of the prob- 
lem brings us to another and an essen- 
tial feature of the national army: the 
system of expansion through reserves. 
Since Schamhorst's day it has been 
adopted in some form or other by every 
nation in the world, except the United 
States, which still retains an army of 
eighteenth-century design. And it is 
the most pacific and complete democ- 
racy of Europe, Switzerland, that has 
carried the system to its logical and ex- 
treme conclusion. 

The Prussian device was quite sim- 
ple. It merely consisted in treating 

60 



THE NATIONAL ARMY 

the 42,000 not as an army, but as the 
skeleton of an army. By having a 
large proportion of officers and non- 
commissioned officers, by providing the 
arms and supplies and battalion organi- 
zations for three, four, and even five 
times the number of men present, it 
was possible to train men in as brief a 
time as possible, and then to pass them 
out of the ranks as trained reservists 
liable to be called up in time of v^ar. 
So well did the system work that in 
1813, when it had barely had the time to 
show results, Prussia succeeded in get- 
ting a quarter of a million of men 
in the field. The troops were of poor 
quality, of course ; they would have hor- 
rified Frederick. But intense patriot- 
ism, the doggedness of Bliicher, and the 
immense services of the General Staff 
in coordinating the efforts of the army, 

61 



ARMS AND THE RACE 

pulled it through to the great triumpK 
of Leipzig. 

It may therefore be said that the na- 
tional army, full fledged, as we find it 
at the fall of Napoleon, presents the 
following characteristics: It has large 
numbers; the training is hasty; the 
quality of the line is poor; the effective 
direction and control of its masses re- 
quires a body of staff experts; it is an 
expansive force, a skeleton in peace but 
in war, ultimately, the armed nation. 
With these characteristics in mind, we 
can turn to the developments of the 
century that follows Waterloo and in- 
vestigate the growth of national pol- 
icies based largely on the new style con- 
script or national armies. 



6^ 



A 



CHAPTER IV 

NATIONAL MILITARY POLICIES 

GREAT idea underlies the na- 



tional army when we compare it 
with the professional army of an 
earlier epoch. The monarch by divine 
right, proprietor of his kingdom and of 
his army, viewed the latter as a per- 
manent force, normally ready, or al- 
most ready, for war. Territorial ac- 
quisition was an ever-present aim, and 
inevitably necessitated violence. After 
the French Revolution, all this tends to 
change, although the agitations of the 
epoch obscure to some extent the un- 
derlying fact. Yet if armies are a citi- 
zen force, and if in time of peace they 

63 



ARMS AND THE RACE 

are maintained in skeleton outline only, 
then, normally, a clearly defined nation 
with self-government will view terri- 
torial acquisition as an unusual act, and 
war as exceptional. Unfortunately 
for Europe, its nationalities were not 
well defined in 1815; self-government 
is still far from wholly achieved ; expan- 
sion — racial, economic, colonial — fur- 
ther complicate the situation. 

When Napoleon fell, France in the 
West and Russia in the East were 
nearer to national self-realization than 
the great jumble of Teutonic, Slav, and 
Latin people that lay in between. The 
nationalistic revolutions of 1821, 1830, 
and 1848 showed what profound dissat- 
isfaction existed; and the upshot came 
in the war of 1859, that created a 
united Italy, and the wars of 1866 and 
1870 that created a larger Germany. 

64< 



MILITARY POLICIES 

We are not concerned here with trac- 
ing or analyzing these great convul- 
sions, but merely in noting their influ- 
ence on the more limited question be- 
fore us. 

With such conditions of national 
overcrowding and national aspiration 
as Europe presented, great military 
struggles were inevitable. The effects 
of these on armies and the policies be- 
hind them are important to trace, 
though these effects varied greatly in 
the different States. In Prussia-Ger- 
many an extreme was reached in one 
direction; in Switzerland in another; 
while in Belgium negative results only 
can be traced. An investigation of the 
national pohcies or attitudes developed 
in these three typical cases must serve 
to illustrate the wider question; while 
a few comparisons with conditions in 

65 



ARMS AND THE RACE 

the United States will serve to close 
the topic. 

After her great effort in the War of 
Liberation, Prussia became somewhat 
negligent of her army, and met with a 
disagreeable surprise in consequence. 
She found herself powerless in the un- 
expected crisis of 1850, and had to ac- 
cept humiliating terms imposed on her 
by Austria. She then started on an 
upward path and within a few years 
von Roon became Minister of War; 
von Moltke, Chief of the General Staff ; 
and von Bismarck, Foreign Minister. 

Von Roon demanded increased num- 
bers. The Prussian assembly de- 
clined, almost unanimously, to vote the 
necessary sums of money. It reflected 
the normal new attitude, the natural re- 
luctance of national representatives to 
increase an army and correspondingly 

66 



MILITARY POLICIES 

to increase taxation beyond what obvi- 
ous necessity appeared to demand. It 
was true that Prussia, owing to the 
weakness of her army, had been unable 
to realize certain ambitions, of the 
Hohenzollerns on the one hand, of the 
German people on the other. Yet 
Prussia's own existence and integrity 
were not directly menaced, and her 
army was in any case powerful enough 
to impose respect on a possible assail- 
ant. So why should not Prussia mind 
her own business, leave the army alone, 
and attend to economic and social ques- 
tions? That is a fair description of the 
attitude of the Prussian assembly in its 
resistance to army increase. 

Year after year von Roon urged his 
case, and failed. Finally Bismarck 
was brought in, the most forceful figure 
of Europe since Napoleon. To him it 

67 



ARMS AND THE RACE 

seemed that Prussia should struggle 
towards a goal, of which Pan- German- 
ism now appears the not-far-distant ac- 
complishment. To attain his ob j ects, — 
the creation of a greater and Prussian- 
ized Germany, — an army and a policy 
of expansion were necessary. And 
when he met the Budget Committee of 
the Landtag to discuss with them army 
appropriations and increase, he roundly 
declared to them, his fist on the table, 
that his policy was one of "blood and 
iron !" 

Blood and Iron! All Germany 
shuddered at this cynical and brutal 
formula, though at the present time 
people are a little apt to forget this 
quite important fact. All Germany 
shuddered. Bismarck stood alone, 
with a few thin-lipped soldiers drawn 
up at attention behind him. And even 

68 



MILITARY POLICIES 

among high-placed officials in Berlin it 
was whispered that he was demented, a 
lunatic who ought to be locked up. 
Unfortunately there was more in what 
he said than they could realize for the 
moment. The policy he intended to 
carry out by violence was irresistibly 
driven by deep acting waves flowing 
steadily towards that very shore on 
which Bismarck had set his over-eager 
eyes. And, to make things worse, the 
intellect of Europe happened at that 
time to be captivated by those theories 
of man struggling in nature which Dar- 
win had made fashionable. In the 
struggle for the survival of the fittest 
were not blood and iron inevitable fac- 
tors? German intellectualism pressed 
in where plain people would not have 
ventured. The historians of Prussia, 
their minds aglow with the exploits of 

69 



ARMS AND THE RACE 

Frederick and the men of 1813, were 
the first to accept the new formula. 
Von Sybel was already at Bismarck's 
beck and call. Von Treitschke, at 
first one of his most bitter critics, got so 
much light from the lifting of Schles- 
wig-Holstein that he promptly found 
religion and discovered one hundred 
historical reasons why Schleswig-Hol- 
stein really belonged to Prussia! In 
reality there were not one hundred rea- 
sons but one only, which Treitschke 
forgot to mention: — Bismarck; or, if 
the reader prefers, blood and iron! 

This rapid conversion of German in- 
tellectualism to the Bismarckian creed 
was one of the great facts lying behind 
the policies which the world sees in ac- 
tion as these lines are written. It will 
be necessary to consider some further 
aspects of German idealism in due 

70 



MILITARY POLICIES 

course. But for the present, we may 
take a glance at the two great wars of 
the reformed Prussian army through 
which, while von Moltke was defeating 
the Austrian and French armies, Bis- 
marck was creating the new Germany. 

Very false impressions exist as to 
what the Prussian army accomplished 
in the campaigns of 1866 and of 1870. 
Victory over opponents who were badly 
led, and in some respects deficient, led 
to the creation of a legend immensely 
removed from the truth. To state the 
case within the present limits is evi- 
dently not possible ; but some indication 
of the truth may be attempted, as it 
would appear to the student of military 
history. Our attention will be concen- 
trated on the campaign of 1870-71. 

The two armies opposed differed in 
several particulars. On the Prusso- 

71 



ARMS AND THE RACE 

German side the emphasis on numbers 
had produced an army numerically su- 
perior to the French, but inferior in the 
solidity of its infantry because the term 
of service was shorter. The first line 
of the French troops, as unit to unit, 
showed much greater cohesion than 
their opponents. Deployment for bat- 
tle was better on defensive positions 
even though the tactical guidance for 
the offensive was less skilful, in fact 
hopelessly inferior. Each of the two 
armies was so large that its control 
proved a difficult problem. This was 
fairly well solved by the Germans — 
that is, they did employ a system of 
control and attained high strategic 
mobility; the French had no real staff 
guidance beyond the primitive expedi- 
ent of a staff attached to the person of 
the commander in the field. This was 

72 



MILITARY POLICIES 

selected from the Etat Major General, 
a corps of special officers created 
shortly after the close of the Napoleonic 
wars. 

The officers of the German General 
Staff were specially trained to keep 
moving smoothly the innumerable 
wheels of a large machine of men and 
transport unrolled over an immense 
stretch of country and attempting to 
reach and overpower an imperfectly 
located opponent. They had all been 
taught the same general principles; 
they applied similar solutions to similar 
problems; and roughly succeeded more 
or less well in keeping the armies in mo- 
tion, getting them together on the field 
of battle, and feeding up the firing lines 
as rapidly and insistently as possible. 
None of these things could be done with 
the French army. 

73 



ARMS AND THE RACE 

Again, in the German army, a new 
and very powerful artillery was used 
with boldness and some tactical skill, 
while the French guns remained mfe- 
rior at every point. The Germans pro- 
duced in von Moltke a good leader, 
where the French showed mostly in- 
capacity and lack of military education. 
In these things alone, differences were 
to be found sufficient to account for the 
disasters of the French army. Yet it 
does not follow from these things that 
the German army was anything like a 
perfect machine as it is so often repre- 
sented to have been. That was, in- 
deed, very far from being the case. 

It was not unnatural that the over- 
powering successes of the German 
armies at Metz and Sedan should have 
created an impression of perfection and 
invincibihty. Writers inexpert in mil- 

74 



MILITARY POLICIES 

itary matters trumpeted this opinion 
loudly. The newspaper man, now 
coming to his brief harvest in the field 
of war, made the matter even worse. 
Germany, intent on building up the 
prestige of the budding empire, gave 
official color to these ideas through the 
history of the war composed by the 
General Staff. But while the official 
panegyrists were cooking the accounts, 
a number of unofficial persons, Ger- 
mans trained for war, observant and 
thoughtful, were beginning to put to- 
gether in a purely detached and scien- 
tific spirit the ideas which they had gar- 
nered from the battlefield. Broadly 
speaking they were specially impressed 
with the weakness of infantry under 
modern conditions, the difficulty of 
maintaining tactical cohesion, the crude- 
ness of the method of control evolved 

75 



ARMS AND THE RACE 

by the General Staff. These points, 
leaving some others on one side, de- 
serve attention because of the impor- 
tant deduction to which they lead. 

The problem in effect was this: 
With the intensity of fire attained by 
modern armaments (in 1870) the com- 
bat and the tactical formations have 
become correspondingly loose. How 
is one, with this looseness, to control 
scattered bodies of men, so as to main- 
tain their cohesion, keep their direction, 
and force them up to the shock? And 
further, how can this be done in correct 
relation to other bodies to the right and 
left and at the opportune moment? 
The first was a tactical, the second a 
staff problem. The latter may be dis- 
missed, for our purpose, as merely in- 
dicating the immense importance of a 
proper system of training for the staff 

76 



MILITARY POLICIES 

and hiffher command of an armv. But 
the tactical problem presents further 
points of interest. 

It was quite evident to honest Ger- 
man investigators that under modern 
conditions of intensified fire, shorter 
training, and looser tactics, their infan- 
try tended to dissolve into a mob. 
And mobs inevitably are less inclined to 
face trouble than to escape it. Evi- 
dently the greatest efforts must be 
made to obtain infantry leading 
highly trained in maintaining cohesion, 
continuous advance, proper direction, 
and the best tactical shock. But with 
whatever pains this difficult standard 
might be pursued, there would still be 
the flinching of the individual soldier 
to overcome, an almost insuperable dif- 
ficulty as the experience of 1870 seemed 
to show. "The only things," wrote 

77 



ARMS AND THE RACE 

Honig, "that can furnish a substitute 
for the lowered action of the leaders on 
the masses, are a more developed senti- 
ment . . . and the national principle 
of honor. ... If a national injury to 
honor, or to territory, and so forth, 
were felt in equal degree by each indi- 
vidual, . . . causing him to require 
satisfaction and to pledge from his in- 
nermost sentiments body and life for 
this, then Tactics would have an easy 
game to play. . . . Mahomet was the 
type of an army psychologist. ... In 
war that which is highest must be 
sought in the soul . . . arid the fight- 
ing method must correspond to it, must 
be national. . . . Nations which desire 
to gain something . . . will as a rule 
possess in their armies more operative 
imponderables [trans, freely: rooted 
'prejudices] than others do . . . that 

78 



MILITARY POLICIES 

merely desire to hold, that is to protect 
their property, their position among 
the nations." ^ 

This idea, that the nation must be 
fanaticized, for this is what it amounts 
to, was the cry of despair of the tacti- 
cian at the ineffectiveness of modern 
infantry for getting a decision by shock. 
It was largely acted on in Germany 
during the period preceding the war 
of 1914, and reinforced the previous 
acceptance by the intellectuals of the 
Bismarckian doctrine of Blood and 
Iron. The nation was trained to think 
in artificial terms all tending to f anati- 
cize the rank and file and thereby to in- 
crease efiiciency.^ 

1 Honig, "Tactics of the Future," 4th Edit. Part 
II. Sect. 1, 3 and 4. 

2 German militarist psychology is a large and diffi- 
cult subject, that can obviously only be touched on 
here. The origin of it goes back to the Bismarckian 
policies; the impetus comes from the Franco-Ger- 

79 



ARMS AND THE RACE 

In the ultimate result — the German 
armed nation of 1914 — we see the mo- 
mentary combination of the citizen 
army with a positive military spirit 
akin to that of the earlier epoch of di- 
vine right monarchs and professional 
soldiers. It is true that expansion is 
more legitimate when, as now, it pro- 
ceeds largely from economic and racial 
causes. Yet on the whole the combina- 
tion just noted is unnatural and must 
be fleeting. At bottom an army made 

man War; the extreme is found in the period imme- 
diately before the outbreak of the present war. The 
reader is advised to turn to the German War Min- 
istry confidential circular of March, 1913, printed in 
the French Yellow Book of November, 1914, for an 
interesting light on the propagandism carried on in 
this last period. An extract follows: 

"Our new army law is but an extension of the mili- 
tary education of the German people. Our ances- 
tors of 1813 made greater sacrifices. It is our sacred 
duty to sharpen the sword which has been placed in 
our hand, and to hold it ready for our defense as 
well as to strike our enemy. The idea that our arma- 
ments are a reply to the armaments and policy of 

80 



MILITARY POLICIES 

up not of professional soldiers but of 
ordinary citizens, framed so as to ex- 
pand in time of war and to dwindle in 
time of peace, represents a negative 
and not a positive military policy. 
And the constantly decreasing power of 
such an army to force a decision through 
shock, tends in the same direction. 
Some of these considerations apply par- 
ticularly to the case of Switzerland. 

the French must be instilled into the people. The 
people must be accustomed to think that an offen- 
sive war on our part is a necessity if we are to com- 
bat the adversary's provocations. We must act with 
prudence in order to arouse no suspicion, and so as 
to avoid the crises which might damage our economic 
life. Things must be so managed that under the 
weighty impression of powerful armaments, of con- 
siderable sacrifices, and of political tension, the out- 
break of war (Losschlagen) shall be considered as 
a deliverance, because after it would come decades 
of peace and of prosperity, such as those which fol- 
lowed 1870. The war must be prepared for from a 
financial point of view. There is much to be done in 
this direction. The distrust of our financiers must 
not be aroused, but nevertheless there are many 
things which it will be impossible to hide." 

81 



ARMS AND THE RACE 

This little republic, the center of 
Europe, has for some years possessed 
the perfect model of a national army. 
The policy of the nation was easy to 
frame in relation with its surroundings. 
North, south, east and west lay neigh- 
bors so powerful as to preclude any 
territorial ambition. On the other 
hand, these neighbors presented a 
threat along every mile of frontier. 
So the Swiss decided on a policy of na- 
tional defense. And defense to be 
bearable, with a small people and rela- 
tively poor country, had to be inexpen- 
sive; while on the other hand to stand 
any chance of success it had to place 
large masses in the field. 

To carry out this policy Switzerland 
gives prehminary military instruction 
in her schools, and at twenty years of 
age calls on every man, mentally, 

82 



MILITARY POLICIES 

physically, and morally fit, to train for 
sixty days. (Ninety days in the artil- 
lery and other special services.) 
Thereafter he trains eleven days a year 
until he reaches the age of thirty-two, 
when he is turned over to the reserve 
which holds him till he is forty-eight. 

The framework for this militia army, 
armament, equipment, officers' corps, 
technical services, munitions of war, 
are maintained in a highly organized 
state so that mobilization of the Swiss 
army can be effected within a few days 
of the call to arms. On first assem- 
bling it is not to be supposed that the 
Swiss infantry would equal the quality 
of the German or French. But a very 
few weeks' experience in the field, 
added to their early training with the 
rifle, would probably turn these hardy 
and liberty-loving mountaineers, of 

83 



ARMS AND THE RACE 

splendid fighting qualities and tradi- 
tion, into an army formidable enough 
under modern standards to put up a 
strong resistance in defensive positions. 
The authorities give varying num- 
bers for the Swiss army. Their first 
line is placed at from 150,000 to 250,- 
000 men. The reserve may be reck- 
oned at almost as many more. An 
army such as that, concentrated on a 
front near the line Bienne-Zurich 
would prove more than an embarrass- 
ment to any French or German army 
that should venture to cross lots 
through Bale and the northwestern cor- 
ner of Switzerland. It is the virtual 
guarantee of the independence of a 
brave people, who have too much sense 
to put their faith in international guar- 
antees of neutrality, and enough spirit 
to be willing to face the military issue 

84 



MILITARY POLICIES 

instead of feebly evading it. With 
Belgium, we come to the opposite case. 
Belgium had twice the population of 
Switzerland, almost one-eighth of the 
population of Germany, and a com- 
merce that ranked higher than that of 
great powers like Italy, Austria-Hun- 
gary, or Russia. She had other ad- 
vantages in the compactness of her pop- 
ulation, her developed railroad system, 
her supplies of coal and iron, her open 
sea frontier. She possessed, in addi- 
tion, a narrow front of some military 
value facing Germany, the line of the 
Meuse between Liege and Givet. In 
other words, her situation as compared 
with Switzerland was immensely more 
favorable for organizing a national de- 
fense. Even as compared with Ger- 
many single handed, with her popu- 
lation compactly placed, on a narrow 

85 



ARMS AND THE RACE 

front, and with great economic re- 
sources, it was not quite hopeless to at- 
tempt to resist her neighbor; the Swiss, 
we may guess, would certainly have 
made the attempt. But that was not 
the practical problem. 

The practical problem was merely 
how to defend Belgian neutrality in 
case of war between other Powers. It 
was true that the neutrality of Belgium, 
hke that of Switzerland, was under the 
guarantee of treaties. But the observ- 
ance of such treaties was not in the 
traditions of European diplomacy. A 
great power dealing with a little one 
was far more likely to consult expedi- 
ency than international ethics, as even 
the United States had recently shown 
in the case of Panama. Beyond all 
that was the definite knowledge, tabu- 
lated on the cards of every general staff 

86 



MILITARY POLICIES 

of Europe, that the railroads recently 
developed by Germany towards the 
Belgian frontier were intended for the 
conveyance of troops, the designation 
and placing of which could almost 
wholly be worked out. German pub- 
licists and writers on military affairs 
did not hesitate to inform the world 
that to carry out against France the 
envelopment on a wide strategic front 
of the von Moltke-von der Goltz school 
a swinging movement through Belgium 
was necessary. It was also clear that 
the narrow frontier in Lorraine was 
wholly inadequate for deploying such 
masses as Germany possessed. The 
economic desirability of seizing the coal 
and iron resources of Belgium and 
northern France was probably not yet 
reahzed to be a fundamental necessity 
for Germany's strategic policy. But 

87 



ARMS AND THE RACE 

even if this last point was not generally 
grasped, it still remains true to say that 
no nation ever received more definite 
warning that her hour was at hand than 
Belgium. 

How did she meet it? Her attitude 
was most characteristic, and had many 
points of resemblance with that of this 
country towards the military problem. 
She was engrossed in one of the most 
remarkable outbursts of industrial 
energy that the world has seen. Labor 
problems and social reforms had be- 
come urgent. She concentrated her at- 
tention on herself. Beyond her border 
there was nothing to interest her, for 
her ambitions did not lie that way. She 
was impatient, one is almost tempted to 
say naturally impatient, at any thought 
of spending money and foresight on 
anything so irreconcilable with her 

88 



MILITARY POLICIES 

ideals as an army. And the upshot 
was a haphazard, neglectful, ineffective 
treatment of the problem. Then she 
woke up one fine morning to find her 
country wrecked and in ashes. 

The Belgian army, costing rather 
more than half again as much as the 
Swiss, roughly thirteen millions of dol- 
lars to eight, was much less efficient. 
It stood on paper at about 48,000 men, 
though this number was not actually 
reached, and the efficiency of its infan- 
try was ranked low. A few show regi- 
ments of the royal guard, and the scien- 
tific attainments of the technical corps 
were good; the rest almost negligible. 
There was a reserve of about the same 
numbers, and a garde civique of no 
military value. Had Belgium been 
equipped with a system half as effective 
as the Swiss, she could have matched 

89 



ARMS AND THE RACE 

man for man with Germany on the 
Liege-Givet line, and quicker, up to 
half a million of men or more. As it 
was her small forces proved useless — 
notwithstanding the exaggerated views 
so widely disseminated as to what took 
place at Liege and afterwards. 

With every country of Europe we 
have to deal with a similar range of 
facts: national policy and the armed 
force. And in no two countries do we 
find the same policy or the same expres- 
sion of it in terms of arms. Some na- 
tions are wise, others foolish; some are 
strong, others weak; some aggressive, 
some pacific; some wasteful, others 
provident. But summing up and look- 
ing to the future it may be said that un- 
less European civilization is doomed to 
suffer some considerable setback, Swit- 
zerland has evolved the logical form of 

90 



MILITARY POLICIES 

the national army, and placed as she is, 
she has been compelled to carry that 
form out to its largest numerical terms. 
Germany made of the national army 
first a weapon for achieving national 
unity, a comprehensible ambition, and 
later a weapon for the assertion of cer- 
tain aims, largely the result of great 
economic expansion, that involved the 
coercion of her neighbors. But this, 
let us hope, is only a passing phase, 
and even the German national army 
may prove a stepping stone to more 
pacific times and methods.^ 

In the United States peculiar condi- 
tions vary the shape of the general argu- 
ment. These conditions will be consid- 
ered shortly. But before reaching 

3 As the present war continues so do its economic 
factors stand out more plainly. The situation may 
be worse than is here indicated, and we may stand 
at the beginning of vast struggles for economic con- 
trol. 

91 



ARMS AND THE RACE 

them it may already be pointed out that 
a similar reluctance to face the military 
problem to that which was shown by 
Belgium is manifest in the United 
States. Fortunately the words Mene, 
Mene, Tekel, Upharsin, have not yet 
appeared on our walls, and the actual 
problem to be considered is far slighter 
than the one which has just concluded 
in the catastrophe of Belgium. Yet 
the United States has no more rational 
pohcy than Belgium had, and has never 
seriously asked the question: What 
are the possibilities that face us, and 
what are the reasonable precautions to 
take in view of such possibilities? 



92 



CHAPTER V 

KRUPPISM AND DISARMAMENT 

A WELL-KNOWN college presi- 
dent, an acknowledged authority 
on fishes, has lately taken a sudden 
plunge into history. The results of his 
investigations lead him to the conclusion 
that for a nation to arm itself is to 
choose the worse alternative between 
"Hell or Utopia." ^ This may repre- 
sent sound reasoning in terms of ichthy- 
ological classifications, though it has a 
suspicious smack of the speciahst in 
headhnes; but to the professional his- 
torian, when apphed to the pohcies of 
nations, it sounds decidedly fishy. Na- 

1 President Jordan, at a public dinner. New York, 
Dec. 2, 1914. 

93 



ARMS AND THE RACE 

tions that frame their policies on the 
"Hell or Utopia" alternative are more 
than likely to get into trouble — either 
way! The real interest lies in seeing a 
little more closely what are the fixed 
values behind certain ways of thought 
and action. Militarism and Pacifism 
may serve as convenient labels under 
which to group them. Let us consider 
them in their mutual reactions. 

Militarism and pacifism; Kruppism 
and disarmament; Hell and Utopia; 
all these are words that represent some- 
thing. Yet as they are most commonly 
used they are nothing more than for- 
mulas for airing prejudices and giving 
the go-by to close investigation and pre- 
cise thinking. To demolish the ex- 
treme doctrines of either party is a com- 
paratively easy task; what is less easy 
is to set down the pros and cons, with 

94 



KRUPPISM 

their significance, so as to arrive at 
something helpful. 

It may be remarked then that mili- 
tarism and pacifism are equally difficult 
of definition. A really advanced pacif- 
ist believes that it is wicked even to 
speak of arms; and he would consider 
a Swiss deputy advising the issue of a 
modem field gun as an enemy of man- 
kind. We need not stop to argue the 
question with him. For an equally 
earnest but moderate pacifist might 
highly approve of the same Swiss dep- 
uty, on the ground that he was merely 
advocating a measure of necessity for 
maintaining the independence of his 
country. It is between these two 
points, which are so far apart, that 
pacifism oscillates. Between the two 
lies the pacifist predisposition. 

Now the pacifist predisposition un- 
95 



ARMS AND THE RACE 

doubtedly proceeds from the advance of 
economic civilization. Man appreci- 
ates more and more the luxuries he 
creates, and therefore tends to reject 
more and more his primitive tendency 
towards war, with its attendant hard- 
ship and suffering. 

Economic civihzation is inevitably 
materialistic, that is, both grasping and 
hedonistic. Happiness of the individual, 
of the greatest number, of the whole 
community, becomes all absorbing. 

Yet on the other hand economic 
ambitions are behind the greatest war 
in history; while often enough we may 
note that war is the greatest spur 
through which economic development 
has been reached. The most strik- 
ing example of this fact dates back 
about three hundred years, and is 
worth attention if we are to see these 

96 



KRUPPISM 

facts in anything like their true propor- 
tions. 

"If a date must be picked at which the 
current of international politics turned 
into the channel with which we are now 
familiar, the year 1600 will answer the 
purpose well enough. . . . Holland, at 
the very beginning of the seventeenth 
century, rapidly passed through phases 
that illuminate the whole current of 
events from that day to this. Let us 
glance at a few ancient facts and mod- 
ern doctrines. One of the theories 
most ardently propagated by the mil- 
lion-dollar endowments is that war 
fatally saps the nation's vitality be- 
cause it destroys the most valuable 
part of its population. The fallacious 
assumptions contained in this doctrine 
are plentiful, but it will suffice for our 
purpose to attack it at on6 point only, 

97 



ARMS AND THE RACE 

and with Holland as the example. That 
country sustained one of the most deso- 
lating wars recorded in modern history, 
and a war that lasted, with scarcely an 
interruption, for no less than forty 
years (1568-1609). Towards the 
close of the conflict success, coupled 
with maritime preponderance, inclined 
to the Dutch arms. Hardly had it ter- 
minated when the Dutch people dis- 
played such extraordinary energy as 
perhaps no European state has ever 
equaled. Almost immediately they 
captured the carrying trade of Europe 
and developed a commercial civilization 
that was the wonder and envy of all 
their neighbors. Three years before 
the truce of 1609 it was already reck- 
oned that the Dutch had three ships to 
the English one, while half a century 
later Colbert stated that there were 

98 



KRUPPISM 

about twenty Dutch ships to every 
French one. Their cities throve as 
none other in Europe. Their art ri- 
valed that of Italy, and Spain, and 
France. With Grotius, they founded 
systematic international law. With 
Spinoza, a little later, they founded the 
philosophy of materialism. And all 
this gigantic work was accomplished by 
a little nation the vitality of which, ac- 
cording to all the pseudo-historical 
theories of the sciolists of pacifism, 
should have been utterly destroyed by 
war. 

"What, then, is the truth of the mat- 
ter? It would appear to be this, that 
the energy generated by war, the confi- 
dence engendered by success, and the 
adaptability and resourcefulness taught 
by military enterprise, far offset any 
debit that may come from the loss of a 

99 



ARMS AND THE RACE 

percentage of the young male popula- 
tion. Successful war, even of such pro- 
longed and devastating character as the 
Dutch war for independence, is the sure 
forerunner of a vigorous period of ex- 
pansion. For modern instances of the 
rule we need seek no further than our 
own Northern States after the Civil 
War, or Germany after the war of 
1870." ^ 

Whatever their dangers, materialism 
and pacifism find man in his most devel- 
oped state. However much we may 
admire the primitive virtues of courage 
and generosity, however much we maj^ 
despise greed and the fear of death or 
even pain, we are bound to take man's 
advance in terms of the intellect. It is 
by thinking and reasoning that we have 

2 Johnston, "Three Hundred Years of War." In- 
fantry Journal, November, 1914. 

100 



KRUPPISM 

advanced; and by thinking and reason- 
ing we have reared a civihzation that 
makes for happiness and abhors de- 
struction and bloodshed. Our great 
problem is one of balance, of advancing 
wisely, without imprudence, lest we slip 
back into the primitive brute, or on the 
other hand lose our foothold in a too- 
eager search for happiness. 

A moderate or temperate pacifism 
would thus appear to be the wise road 
for a nation to follow. Switzerland 
may be said to conform to this ideal. 
Spain, with her small army and navy, 
might be thought of in the same cate- 
gory were it not for her evident lack of 
vitality. France has been partly pa- 
cific, partly aggressive. The rebuild- 
ing of her army after the disaster of 
1870-71 was a reasonable act of pru- 
dence, and for the most part her atti- 

101 



ARMS AND THE RACE 

tude towards her continental neighbors 
has been all that it should be. Yet her 
African pohcy has been one of con- 
quest, and at times, under some provo- 
cation, she has assumed an aggressive 
attitude as to Alsace-Lorraine. Eng- 
land, long an active military power in 
terms of colonial empire, closed an 
epoch with the end of the nineteenth 
century. She no longer aims at con- 
quest. And the withdrawal of her 
ships of the line from the Pacific marked 
her abandonment of world-wide mari- 
time supremacy. Within her own 
waters, and along the shores that face 
her she still pursues, perhaps inevitably, 
a policy of naval supremacy. This 
policy reposes on the fast increasing 
vulnerability of her sea-borne commerce 
and food supply. 

There are two topics of special inter- 
ior 



KRUPPISM 

est constantly brought forward in pa- 
cifist debates: disarmament and the 
"international mind." Each is worth 
some discussion. The first is essen- 
tially a practical question; the second, 
an intellectual one. 

Disarmament is essentially a practi- 
cal question. We may accept as a 
basis of argument that it is wholly de- 
sirable that the great Powers should 
agree to a permanent peace. On this 
basis what are the difficulties of the 
question, its probabilities, our possible 
means of action? There can be no 
doubt, when we view the condition of 
the great European powers and Japan, 
and when we consider the reaction of 
public sentiment that will occur at the 
close of the present war, that disarma- 
ment is urgent. Are the difficulties in 
its way superable? 

103 



ARMS AND THE RACE 

One of the gravest obstacles lies in 
the fact that no two nations are situ- 
ated in the same way. Will Germany 
disarm? This means the surrender of 
her ambitions to expand over the less 
well occupied regions of the world. It 
means the arousing of a fear that the 
hostile or alien elements within the em- 
pire, the Danes, the Poles, the people 
of Alsace-Lorraine, even the Bavarians 
or Saxons, might then attempt to assert 
local sovereignty. It means fear that 
the superior numbers of Russia, which 
could not be wholly disarmed, might 
prevail against her. 

It has just been said that Russia 
could not wholly disarm. Her Cos- 
sacks are the finest raw cavalry in the 
world, though almost useless in organ- 
ized armies for lack of training. But if 
organized armies were suppressed they 

104 



KRUPPISM 

might then easily prove the decisive 
force. 

For even if these primitive tribes- 
men could be made to surrender car- 
bine and sword and ammunition, even 
if the manufacture of arms were de- 
clared illegal, it is obviously they who 
could most rapidly beat out from 
the plowshare the spear head or the 
sword ; and the days of Attila might be 
on us again. 

In the case of England the difficulty 
is even gixater. The English army 
has long been maintained for colonial 
and not for European purposes. 
Would she be required to put it down 
on a European disarmament; or might 
she retain it? To put it down would 
open the Khyber pass and create a new 
Mogul empire. Will Afghanistan be 
required to disarm, and will Arabia, 

105 



ARMS AND THE RACE 

and, if so, who will enforce the decree, 
and how? 

The practical difficulties grow the 
more we study the details. And we 
need not even state the further compli- 
cations that the parallel question of 
naval disarmament introduces. With 
that also no two countries, no two geo- 
graphical areas, present the same con- 
ditions. England is situated thus and 
Austria so. The North Sea may favor 
a flotilla defensive, the Atlantic a super- 
dreadnought offensive, and so on in- 
definitely. Yet there are broad lines 
that may be stated tentatively, even if 
they lead to somewhat negative conclu- 
sions. 

As a general proposition it is clear 
that with the western European nations 
the development of national armies co- 
incides closely with that of economic 

106 



KRUPPISM 

resources. Warfare has become so ex- 
tensive in scope and in technical com- 
phcation as to have become an intoler- 
able burden on the comparatively small 
areas that support it in this extreme 
form. The question of the size of na- 
tions will be noticed in the next chapter; 
for the present it is sufficient to observe 
that the further east one proceeds the 
less is the burden felt, so that the dis- 
armament of the western nations could 
only result in the rise of the Powers ly- 
ing east of them. 

It would seem therefore that all that 
is practical, all that is desirable, is the 
carrying forward of the tendency to 
disarm, without expecting too much or 
pressing forward too ardently. Militia 
armies of the Swiss type are clearly 
possibilities for England or France 
witMn the next few years. Such 

107 



ARMS AND THE RACE 

armies would be too weak for offense to 
be a real menace to peace, but, if effi- 
cient, strong enough for defense, for 
safeguarding independence and inter- 
ests. 

Swiss model armies, however, even 
though they are a probable phase of the 
near future for western Europe, could 
not satisfy the conditions of an interna- 
tional police for the maintenance of 
world peace. Such a police force would 
mean of necessity small and scattered 
numbers, but high efficiency; in other 
words, the professional army over again, 
though on a new basis. It is difficult to 
believe at the present time that we are 
within sight of a moment when the 
European powers could effect the tre- 
mendous and dangerous change from 
the basis of numbers to that of quality; 
yet below the surface causes are work- 

108 



KRUPPISM 

ing in that direction that are quite likeljr 
to show up before many more years 
have passed. 

Professional armies would afford the 
best basis for a world police, if for no 
better reason than that international 
cooperation would become more neces- 
sary between Powers each of which had 
only a small army. A professional 
force, small but adequate in size, is fur- 
ther a more valuable element of stability 
within a State than a national armv 
watered down to the Swiss militia 
standard. For every country, particu- 
larly with the growth of industrialism 
and cities, has to face recurrent periods 
of disorder in which the local police 
forces may prove inadequate and re- 
quire stiffening. In the history of the 
United States, presently to be dealt 
with, there is one extraordinary illustra- 

109 



ARMS AND THE RACE 

tion of the far-reaching results that de- 
pend on just such an adjustment. 
Again, turning to the problem pre- 
sented by the eastern people lying 
roughly in the great triangle Belgrade, 
Kabul, Magdala, it is clear that small 
highly efficient forces can accomplish 
more in the way of pacification than na- 
tional militias. 

Another general idea that we hear 
much debated is that of the interna- 
tional mind. It is evident that we have 
here a question that does not bear in any 
immediate sense on the question of arm- 
ament. If internationalism is an in- 
evitable tendency, it clearly favors dis- 
armament in the long run. The super- 
ficial adjustments of human life, and 
the standardization of materialistic hap- 
piness, make for some such unification 
as is here in question. It is conceivable 

110 



KRUPPISM 

that in due process of years the China- 
man, Zulu, and North American will 
set approximately equal values on 
plumbing and moving pictures, on wire- 
less telephones and inexpensive shock 
absorbers. But even if they should, 
could that negative racial antagonism? 
You may get the whole world thinking 
alike on ninety-nine per cent, of the 
questions which the ordinary citizen 
ever does think about. But the one per 
cent, left unaccounted for may possibly 
wreck the whole edifice founded on the 
rest. 

A few will go even further than mere 
scepticism as to the utility of the "inter- 
national mind." Unification or simpli- 
fication is a pseudo-philosophical con- 
cept based on a misunderstanding of 
the laws of race and the laws of intellect. 
Advance goes with complexity and 

111 



ARMS AND THE RACE 

the greater opportunity for selection. 
Commercial intercourse may require a 
simplification of language, but intellec- 
tual progress demands more and 
greater complication. The substitu- 
tion of a single language for the variety 
of tongues now possessed by man, 
would within the space of a gen- 
eration prove a disaster for the power 
of expression and the power of thought 
of the race. 

Turning from these remote possibili- 
ties, we shall iind something more tan- 
gible in the state of affairs we may 
designate as Kruppism. One of the 
least edifying features of the competi- 
tion for armaments has been the growth 
of huge industrial enterprises earning 
millions out of the development of en- 
gines for taking human life. To this 
must be added the employment of 

112 



KRUPPISM 

methods, often savoring of corruption, 
for obtaining favorable contracts. It 
should be said, however, that such 
methods are not pecuHar to firms en- 
gaged in such industries. It might be 
possible to get an international agree- 
ment prohibiting the manufacture of 
arms and war material by private firms, 
together with commerce in such articles 
from one country to another. Even 
Russia might be persuaded into such an 
agreement; and it would amount to a 
step in restraint of war. On the other 
hand, it will doubtless be argued that 
private cornpetition stimulates inven- 
tion and improvement. 

To close the chapter, we might glance 
at another formula of the extreme 
pacifists. It may fairly be stated as 
follows: That armaments create war 
and that any risk is wiser than to in- 

113 



ARMS AND THE RACE 

crease armaments. This formula is 
compounded in about equal parts of 
truth and untruth. It is true that the 
race of armaments may under favoring 
circumstances bring about the very re- 
sult which its advocates claim to pre- 
vent. Without any doubt the great 
war of 1914 was in part caused by the 
mere existence of an immense war ma- 
chine. That machine had long been 
the dominant force of European poli- 
tics, it had long been perfected and 
strengthened into one of the wonders 
of Western civiHzation. But no one 
had seen it at work, though all that was 
needed to set it going was the pressing 
of a button. Inevitably that button 
had to be pressed some day. 

Few would care to deny this, yet it 
does not justify the conclusion of the 
pacifist formula. That thing has hap- 

114* 



KRUPPISM 

pened with a given countr}^ under given 
conditions. We may even push further 
and say : the thing tends to result from 
increasing armaments. But is that 
tendency of necessity a strong one? Is 
it not, on the contrary, in nearly every 
case we know, a slight one? And is 
not, in reality, the practical problem, 
one of balancing the pros and the cons? 
Let us glance at the present cases of 
France, England, and the United 
States. 

France has been one of the great com- 
petitors in the struggle of armaments. 
Within recent years there was a mo- 
ment, after the introduction of the 75 
millimeter quick-firing gun, when she 
led handsomely in the race. Yet this 
did not result in any appreciable depar- 
ture from the restrained attitude to- 
wards her continental neighbors that she 

115 



ARMS AND THE RACE 

had till then maintained. The English 
fleet, with some ups and downs in effi- 
ciency, has generally held a command- 
ing superiority during the same period. 
And there is practically nothing we may 
rightly call aggression in England's at- 
titude, save in what relates to her deter- 
mination to fight rather than permit 
Germany to establish a naval base in 
the middle Atlantic. This determina- 
tion was not directly the outcome of 
naval superiority, but of a different set 
of reasons. 

The case of the United States within 
the sphere of American politics is very 
similar. Following the Spanish war 
we began to expand our navy until in a 
few years, almost suddenly, it became 
one of the great navies of the world. 
Within the political theater of the West 
Indies and South America it was far 

116 



KRUPPISM 

more preponderant than the German 
war machine was in Europe. Did we 
become mihtarists in consequence? 
Have we abused our force in Mexico? 
Is there any unwise and inflammable 
tendency among our people so to abuse 
it? Those who argue that an increase 
in the size of the American army would 
turn the American people into mili- 
tarists, pay a pretty poor compliment to 
the common sense and the rooted good 
qualities of our people. 

These questions of militarism or pa- 
cifism; of Kruppism or disarmament; 
of Hell or Utopia, are of vast interest 
and importance. They are infinitely 
arguable. But the man who will serve 
his country best will have the patience 
to study each particular problem as a 
definite case and the more he studies 
such problems the less he will be likely 

117 



ARMS AND THE RACE 

to solve them with a long word, the 
more he will be likely to find himself 
forced in the direction of practical, 
makeshift measures, which no eloquent 
formulas are likely to fit, but that may 
yet be of infinite value to his country. 



118 



CHAPTER VI 

EUROPE — ASIA — AMERICA 

A ND now, the map. One of the 
-^"^ greatest facts behind the conflict 
now proceeding, is the world's shrink- 
age. Communication, the interrelation 
of nations, the circulation of the human 
corpuscles within the world's body, are 
all immensely increased, intensified. 
And the great war in Europe is, among 
other things a result of overcrowding, 
of friction, a struggle for size. 

Had the Germans reached Paris, and 
the French continued to fight from be- 
hind the Loire, nobody could have 
missed the point. France with some 
forty millions of people is oppressed by 

119 



ARMS AND THE RACE 

the weight of Germany, which has about 
sixty-five millions. To these sixty-five 
millions add the Germans within the 
Austrian Empire together with the 
Slav populations over which the Ger- 
mans are extending political and eco- 
nomic suzerainty, and the weight be- 
comes well-nigh overpowering. 

But the Germans themselves are in 
turn overweighted. Beyond them lie 
one hundred and sixty millions of Rus- 
sians, and a sparsely populated country 
of almost boundless agricultural and 
industrial possibilities. Just as the 
French feel the weight of the Germans, 
so do the Germans feel the weight of 
the Russians. And these relations of 
weight and bulk, so to speak, are becom- 
ing every day more appreciable owing 
to increasing facility of communication. 

Turn the question another way about. 
ISO 



EUROPE— ASIA— AMERICA 

Until half a century ago Europe re- 
mains large enough for practical pur- 
poses. Then comes the consolidation 
of the Italian people, who are followed 
by the Germans, and at the same mo- 
ment occurs a great extension, through 
railroad construction, of means for cir- 
culating. Before then the mountain- 
ous regions of central Europe, with no 
large national grouping, together with 
imperfect and difficult roads, had held 
Europe sufficiently dispersed. Eco- 
nomic development, and more pacific 
conditions have rapidly brought fast 
growing nations closer together. And 
in most of western Europe the popula- 
tion by the beginning of the twentieth 
century was outrunning its agricultural 
resources. Food supply was ceasing to 
be local and becoming international. 
A few great areas of wheat were emerg- 

121 



ARMS AND THE RACE 

ing as the central food supply of many- 
nations. 

In a way, Europe itself was out- 
grown. Draw a line from Konigsberg 
on the Baltic to Odessa on the Black 
Sea. West of that lies a stretch of 
country, highly favored by climate and 
water communication. But it is now 
rapidly feeling its relatively small size. 
It would hold comfortably between Key 
West and Chicago, the Aroostook and 
Mobile. Yet within it are crammed 
half a dozen civilizations, a dozen lan- 
guages, and well-nigh twenty armies, 
three quarters of which are in a high 
state of efficiency. The hostile lines of 
competing tariff systems are just as nu- 
merous; while a multiplicity of tradi- 
tions, in which war and religion play a 
great part, are hopelessly rooted in a 
past that is not altogether edifying. 

122 



EUROPE— ASIA— AMERICA 

Imagine all this in between Chicago 
and New York, and how unhappy we 
should be! 

Partly as a result of this, Europe is 
now pouring a population in ever-in- 
creasing numbers across the Atlantic 
which is eager for more space and op- 
portunity. Even the governments feel 
the pinch. France creates an African 
empire. England develops great colo- 
nial areas. Italy attempts to flow back 
around the eastern Mediterranean as 
Rome did before her. Little Belgium 
tucks central Africa into a pocket of 
which the lining has now been destroyed. 
Germany alone failed, or at most picked 
up a few leavings when it was too late. 
But all this merely eased what is at bot- 
tom a hopeless situation. For Europe 
cannot stand the pressure of expansion 
much longer if it continues on the 

123 



ARMS AND THE RACE 

same lines as during the last fifty years. 

In any case, Russia overbalances 
Europe. The Germans are largely 
justified in their fear of Russia. Not 
justified in terms of civilization per- 
haps, for there is as yet no ground for 
supposing that Russia is incapable of 
equaling such cultural developments as 
those Germany incessantly advertises; 
but justified in terms of size, in terms of 
self-assertion, of independence. Take 
the mere matter of bulk. From the 
Prusso-Russian frontier near Warsaw, 
it is just over a thousand miles to the 
extreme western point of France, but 
eastward to Vladivostock on the Pacific 
is four or five times that distance, and 
all under the Tzar's flag. 

Clearly the bulk of Russia, now that 
railroads are so rapidly killing distance, 
overtopples that of western Europe. 

124< 



EUROPE— ASIA— AMERICA 

A grown-up Russia, half Europe and 
half Asia, will make the terms Europe 
and Asia obsolete. And in the war 
now being waged the Slavs are onty 
just beginning to display the huge mili- 
tary power which the future holds in 
store for them. While France and 
Switzerland and Germany can place in 
the field perhaps one male in every five, 
Russia is as yet too poor and too un- 
educated to place even as many as one 
in twenty.^ France is at the end of her 
tether in terms of conscript armies; 
Germany cannot make very large gains ; 
but Russia is only just beginning. A 
success in the present war may merely 
whet her appetite; a failure will leave 
her more determined than in the past to 
develop her resources further. 

1 On paper Russia disposes of from four to eight 
millions of soldiers. But her past record in such mat- 
ters leaves one rather skeptical. 

125 



ARMS AND THE RACE 

Incidentally to these struggles the 
question of customs unions arises. In 
an attempt to gain size, in the case of 
nations, we may expect after the war to 
see efforts made at larger customs zones 
in Europe. Prussia has already tested 
the efficacy of such means for political 
enlargement. And it may also be 
pointed out that no adjustment is more 
conducive to peace than a destruction of 
the customs barriers between countries. 
If a few of our extreme pacifists would 
go out of orator}'' and go into negotia- 
tions for demolishing tariff walls, they 
would accomplish a great deal more 
than they do for the peace of the world. 

The old distinction between Europe 
and Asia is fast becoming less clear. 
In the North, Russia nearly spans the 
two continents. In the South, the 
transitions from Vienna through Con- 

1^6 



EUROPE— ASIA— AMERICA 

stantinople to Delhi, and thence to 
Tokio, are not to be thought of merely 
in terms European or Asiatic. Eco- 
nomic resources and organization, mili- 
tary power, are in many ways more im- 
portant touchstones. 

In undeveloped economic resources, 
in martial spirit, in religious zeal and 
cohesiveness, the Mohammedan world 
presents a problem for the near future. 
If the Khalifate of the Ottoman Turks 
at Constantinople is now doomed, as 
many believe, a new Khalifate will in- 
evitably come into existence. The 
question is where ? And the most prob- 
able points are Mecca, Bagdad, Cairo, 
or Kabul. No one can as yet proph- 
esy the course of events within the Mo- 
hammedan world; at the most a few 
factors and tendencies may be pieced 
together, for what they are worth. 

127 



ARMS AND THE RACE 

First, then, is the fact already pointed 
out, that a new Khalif ate will probably- 
soon arise. To this we may add that 
the same tendency as in Europe towards 
shrinkage is proceeding in Asia and 
Africa, though at a slower pace. Yet 
Pan-Mohammedanism, which is partly 
a product of this shrinkage, is distinctly 
in sight; and a new Khalif ate will al- 
most inevitably tend towards a greater 
empire that might eventually stretch 
from the heart of Africa to the heart of 
Asia. Even if this consummation lies 
beyond the view of our own generation, 
a nearer step may not be so very long 
deferred. The Afghan princes may 
quite conceivably regain their lost foot- 
hold in India and plant the crescent once 
more on the towers of Delhi.^ 

2 I omit a discussion of the Senoussi movement, as 
not really material to the general argument. 

128 



EUROPE— ASIA— AMERICA 

Should Mohammedanism in any 
form create a new empire in southwest- 
ern Asia, then once more let us turn to 
the map. Asia would then have most 
of her immense territory divided into 
three great masses: Russia, China, 
and the Mohammedan lands, with the 
southeast parcelled out on a smaller 
scale. And each of those three great 
divisions would in turn contain easily, 
almost twice over, all the European 
States lying west of Russia. In terms 
of bulk, in terms of modern methods of 
communication, Europe compared to 
Asia would be very much as Belgium 
was to Germany before recent events. 
And let us add that seventy-five years 
ago communication was much more dif- 
ficult in Europe than it has now become 
in Asia. 

But neither India nor Japan has yet 
129 



ARMS AND THE RACE 

been mentioned. It is difficult to be- 
lieve that a people so intelligent and so 
proud as the Japanese have not esti- 
mated a tendency from which they are 
almost certain to suffer eventually. At 
the present day they have attained a 
momentary supremacy in Asia. They 
have imposed their will on China and 
Russia. Their alliance with England 
when first entered into was one whereby 
the dominant Pacific power gave them 
an aid which was indispensable. But 
the present crisis has reversed the roles 
of the two allies. Great Britain first 
drew her fleet in to the North Sea, and 
has now drawn her army towards the 
same point, so that in fact she is leaning 
on her alhance with Japan for securing 
the stability of Asia. For ten years 
Japan leaned on the support of Eng- 
land; now it is England leans on the 

130 



EUROPE— ASIA— AMERICA 

support of Japan ; that is a considerable 
fact in the history of Asia. 

Undoubtedly the Japanese realize all 
this, and perceive the precariousness of 
England's Asiatic prestige and posi- 
tion. Yet the precariousness of their 
own position is just as evident, because 
the future belongs to the great countries 
and they are small. 

The question is, will they attempt to 
seize a favorable moment and to gain 
expansion while there is yet time? 
Their pohcy, past, and present, points 
on the whole to this conclusion. Their 
successful wars of the last twenty years 
have been followed by enormous an- 
nexations of territory, and an even 
greater spread of economic suzer- 
ainty. 

And now, though heavily burdened 
financially, and free from any military 

131 



ARMS AND THE RACE 

menace, they have decided on large in- 
creases for their army and navy. 

Japan's pohcy, if, as seems probable, 
it is to take an aggressive form, may lie 
along one of several lines. China for 
the moment holds together in the hands 
of a strong and politic military dic- 
tator. But is it worth more than his 
life? Is not rupture in sight? And 
may not Japan eventually succeed in 
creating a great continental empire 
from the fragments? If this is not her 
ambition, or if she finds her way barred, 
then she may turn to the Pacific, and in 
the Pacific, it is the colonies of Euro- 
pean powers, and our two great pos- 
sessions, the Philippines and Alaska, 
that might prove the most tempting 
baits.^ 

3 Every incident since these lines were written be- 
fore the fall of Tsing Tau confirms the impression. 

132 



EUROPE— ASIA— AMERICA 

For the moment, however, it would 
seem as though the Japanese statesmen 
were wisely bent on avoiding quarrels 
with Europe and America, while con- 
centrating their efforts on the political 
and economic penetration of China. 
This course may be less dangerous to 
us than the other; but the values in- 
volved are very shifting; the great 
events proceeding in Europe may affect 
the world situation profoundly; and in 
a general sense it is true to say that 
Japan feels the spur of the situation 
and is likely to respond in ways that in 
any case must constitute a danger. 

The question of the Pacific cannot be 
approached merely from its Asiatic 
side; there is also an American one. 
And to understand that we must glance 

Japan has clearly made up her mind that now, if ever^ 
is her opportunity of absorbing Northern China. 

133 



ARMS AND THE RACE 

back at the course of our history. Our 
early statesmen, George Washington 
and Monroe among them, wisely be- 
lieved that our remoteness from Europe 
was our greatest blessing, and that we 
should utilize it by keeping out of all 
possible entanglements. It might even 
be better on occasion not to trade with 
Europe at all than to run the risk of 
complications. As to diplomatic inter- 
course, the less the better ; and that car- 
ried on by plain citizens; men of busi- 
ness or of law. That position was en- 
tirely comprehensible, let us say wise. 

It was wise, in view of our size at 
that epoch, of our relations with the out- 
side world, and of the state of communi- 
cations. But from that epoch to the 
present, in a hundred years or so, a tre- 
mendous transformation has proceeded. 
Our people have slowly filled up our 

134 



EUROPE— ASIA— AMERICA 

boundaries, and in places have already 
begun to migrate beyond. Communi- 
cation has been phenomenally increased 
and cheapened. Our relations with 
the outside world have grown by leaps 
and bounds. Would Washington, at 
the present day, lay down for us the 
same policy as he did a century ago? 
It is not conceivable. 

Already, by 1823, the situation had 
changed. Our power had increased, 
our outlook widened; and we stated to 
France and Russia, and other Powers, 
who were glancing across the Atlantic 
at South America, that we were more 
interested in that part of the world than 
they, and that we desired them to ab- 
stain from interference there. 

Then came the steamboat, and the 
Atlantic and all the other seas began 
to dwindle. And after the steamboat 

135 



ARMS AND THE RACE 

came the telegraph, and a message 
flashed from America to Europe in sec- 
onds instead of weeks or months. In 
1861 came a great miHtary and naval ex- 
pedition of France against Mexico ; but 
it so happened that the United States 
was able to place half a million trained 
soldiers in the field at that epoch, and 
eventually compelled France to with- 
draw. 

Since then the processes of expansion 
and interpenetration have proceeded 
with ever-increasing velocity. At the 
present day a population about equal 
to that of France and Germany occu- 
pies in the United States a territory 
that could hold those two countries six 
times over. Within the last few years 
we have come into close contact with 
the Spanish- American people lying to 
the south of us. We have fought 

136 



EUROPE— ASIA— AMERICA 

Spain, and taken from her Cuba and 
the Phihppines; we have dug a canal 
through Spanish- American territory ; 
we have imposed a protectorate on some 
part of Central America; and finally 
we have intervened, though with uncer- 
tain policies, in the internal affairs of 
Mexico. These are all symptoms of a 
tendency of which the foundations are 
to be found in the racial and economic 
expansion that we are now going 
through. And it is safe to predict that 
this expansion still has before it a 
lengthy future. 

The effect of these events on the 
United States in terms military pre- 
sents features of resemblance with what 
may be seen in Germany. In the lat- 
ter countrj'- a tremendous outburst of 
economic energy was coupled with a 
large increase of industrialism and city 

137 



ARMS AND THE RACE 

population. Food production rapidly 
fell towards the danger point. A badly 
conducted diplomatic policy tended to 
encircle Germany with enemies and 
threaten her supplies ; while on the other 
hand colonial ambition was aroused. 
And a powerful navy was the inevitable 
result. 

In the United States the reasons 
through which a great fleet came into 
existence were similar but not the same. 
The Spanish war revealed the inade- 
quacy of our armaments; — no Ameri- 
can citizen can afford to leave unread 
Admiral Chadwyck's admirable account 
of how some of our supposed men-of- 
war had to be towed around the Carib- 
bean Sea! This revelation, together 
with the increasing demand for the ap- 
plication of moral pressure at Spanish- 
American ports, indicated the need for 

138 



EUROPE— ASIA— AMERICA 

an adequate navy. The pressure of 
our capital, of our exports, of our min- 
ing and engineering experts; the dig- 
ging of Panama; the consciousness of 
future developments of ever-increasing 
magnitude in the same direction; all 
made for the creation of the present 
American navy. 

But the expansion of the United 
States can only be seen in its true pro- 
portions as a phase of the expansion of 
England. And England, in the form 
of Canada, lies to the north of us, our 
neighbor on the American continent. 
Canada and the United States together 
are roughly of the same size as all 
Europe including European Russia; or 
of the Russian Empire ; or of China ; or 
of the federation which may be created 
some day in South America. The 
climatic, agricultural, and economic 

139 



ARMS AND THE RACE 

conditions of the two countries are sim- 
ilar. Political and social ideas are 
tending in the same general direction, 
A common language creates a strong 
bond, increased by a similar tendency 
towards pacific and industrial aims. 
The most serious international prob- 
lems, those that come from over the 
Atlantic and over the Pacific, are the 
same for both countries. To the think- 
ing American, Canada is virtually with 
us, save for an uncomfortable line of 
customs that checks a closer intercourse 
between two kindred communities. 

Canada and the United States are 
face to face with the same troublesome 
and dangerous question, that of Asiatic 
immigration. It fortunately does not 
belong to the present discussion, and we 
need only note its danger and difficulty, 
with one point more. With the same 

140 



EUROPE— ASIA— AMERICA 

problem to face, Canada and the 
United States inevitably tend to act to- 
gether. It is probable that behind the 
scenes British diplomacy, with the ad- 
vantage of the Japanese alliance, has al- 
ready attempted to find a solution by 
pacific means. If such means should 
fail ultimately, then it is our fleet com- 
ing through Panama into the Pacific 
that must protect not only the coast of 
California but, should the occasion arise, 
that of British Columbia as well. 

It is through cooperation between 
Canada and the United States, it is at 
the point where the English speaking 
people bulk largest in numbers and 
space, that a greater association can be 
formed. For a good many years past 
Great Britain has attempted to find a 
formula for Imperial Federation. She 
has failed. And her failure is due to 

141 



ARMS AND THE RACE 

two things. One is, that it is not pos- 
sible to build a tariff wall within which 
she and her widespread colonies can 
enter on equal terms. The other reason 
is that, however great her wealth and 
power, she is too small and lies in a 
geographical spot that is bad as the ex- 
pansion of the world proceeds to-day. 

"The world cares far less than it did 
twenty-five or even ten years ago about 
what the terms empire, monarchy, re- 
publicj federation, may be held to im- 
ply; but it cares more than ever it did 
about the economic conditions affecting 
the ordinary citizen under whatever 
form of government he may be living. 
... It is along some such lines as these 
that the advent of the American fleet 
into the Pacific should bring us closer to 
the other English-speaking states, and 
lay the foundations of a new and greater 

142 



EUROPE— ASIA— AMERICA 

empire. We surely have outgrown any 
jealousy, any dislike, with which we for- 
merly looked on the British flag. We 
surely have become too great to con- 
tinue the country attorney policies that 
have too often done duty for statesman- 
ship in the conduct of our foreign af- 
fairs. We surely can see the advan- 
tage, and the honor, of advancing on a 
broadened path of nationalism toward 
a future in which we should form the 
solid and splendid base of a group of 
mutually supporting Commonwealths. 
With its center and bulk of population 
stretching from Key West to Vancou- 
ver, one of its members wide across the 
Atlantic, another wide across the Pa- 
cific, the English-speaking world would 
take a new shape, and the British Em- 
pire would make way for something far 
stronger, in which not only Great Brit- 

143 



I ARMS AND THE RACE 

ain and the United States would find 
an equal place, but also the four grow- 
ing young sisters, Canada, New Zea- 
land, Australia, and South Africa. To 
understand and to wish a thing is half 
way to having it. If in the momentous 
developments of the next few years, in 
which the Canal and Asia must play a 
larger part, we fix our minds on the pos- 
sibilities here indicated, not in any petty 
spirit of aggrandizement, but in that 
broader and humane spirit that has 
marked so much of our Mother Coun- 
try's accomplished work, who knows 
but that we in turn may carry that work 
on to even greater ends? All that we 
need is to rise to a larger view of our 
responsibilities." * 

4 R. M. Johnston, "The Imperial Future of the 
United States." Infantry Journal, November, 1913. 



144 



CHAPTER VII 

MILITARY EXPERIENCES OF THE UNITED 
STATES 

MILITARY history is much ob- 
scured by the survivor, the his- 
torian and the journahst. They are 
virtually banded in an unholy alliance 
to tell us everything except what we 
really ought to know. And even in 
what they do tell us, accuracy is more 
completely sacrificed than in almost any 
branch of mental activity. This pro- 
ceeds inevitably from the very nature 
of war. 

The soldier knows too little, and the 
general often enough too much, about 
the facts. The battle is mostly smoke, 

145 



ARMS AND THE RACE 

confusion, and excitement, in which 
little is seen and all is distorted. The 
weary survivor, unless the event is of a 
very unusual or striking description, be- 
gins to get his impressions at night, sit- 
ting around the camp-fire, from com- 
rades about as well informed as himself. 
But some men are natural talkers, some 
have imagination. And these blaze out 
a path, uncertainly compounded of fact 
and fiction, along which the rest follow. 
In due course the camp-fire legends be- 
come crystallized. And by the time 
the old soldier is fighting the old battles 
over for his grandchildren, the residuum 
of fact is usually very elusive indeed. 

The general sees better and knows 
more; yet he may be even more unreli- 
able as a witness. For he has responsi- 
bilities and may be implicated. Mili- 
tary operations are in their nature full 

146 



MILITARY EXPERIENCES 

of unforeseen incidents, marked by a 
continuous series of errors based on 
misinformation, or miscalculation, or 
the failure of subordinates. The gen- 
eral leaves these for the most part out 
of his account, puts a good face on what 
is usually a pretty bad matter, and 
makes things come out as near as pos- 
sible to some stock pattern of what 
really ought to have happened — but 
didn't! 

The newspaperman, the historian, 
occasionally help a little, but not very 
much. They are better situated for 
giving a fair account, even if not eye 
witnesses, than the combatants them- 
selves. But they have graven images 
of their own. They are looking for a 
drama, for deeds of heroism, for satis- 
factions of national prejudices, and all 
things that will enable them to mobilize 

147 



ARMS AND THE RACE 

their eloquence. What they will not do 
is to dig down into those hidden springs 
from which proceed the success or the 
failure of armies: — their organization; 
their armament ; their tactics ; their sup- 
ply system; the training of their regi- 
mental officers, of their staff, of their 
higher command; their system of com- 
mand; and the national policy of which 
these things are just so many expres- 
sions. Such matters do not make head- 
lines or motion pictures; they require 
knowledge, application, and study; and 
consequently they are labeled milita- 
rism, and scrapped! 

So what with the great difficulty of 
dealing with the evidence, and with the 
wrong proclivities of those who set it 
before the public, it is not difficult for a 
whole nation to grow up in a state of 
complete misconception as to its own 

148 



MILITARY EXPERIENCES 

military history. The people of the 
United States are precisely in that situ- 
ation. To remedy it we require the 
complete rewriting of our military his- 
torj^ — a formidable task. Here, there 
is nothing to be done save to pick out a 
few salient facts and to indicate their 
bearings. 

Our, worst tradition was early estab- 
lished, that of ill-considered, wasteful 
and ineffective half measures. It is 
reckoned that during the War of Inde- 
pendence there were 395,000 enrol- 
ments for service, many of them of 
course of the same man presenting him- 
self again. Yet Washington was 
never able to place 20,000 men in line, 
and was generally so hopelessly inferior 
that he could not venture on decisive 
operations. His most brilliant achieve- 
ments were accomplished at the head of 

149 



ARMS AND THE RACE 

2,500 men. Under this system it cost 
$170,000,000 to carry the war through, 
to say nothing of the pensions paid to 
over 95,000 persons, some of which, 
widows of survivors, were still living and 
drawing their pay, a century later. 

The source of the mischief lay in the 
fact that the control of the whole matter 
was with the Continental Congress, and 
that this body was jealous of a standing 
army, had no knowledge of mihtary 
questions, and was inclined for cheese- 
paring. This was perhaps inevitable, 
but it was costly, in lives, time, and 
money. Congress chose to believe, for 
no reasons that will bear examination, 
that the struggle would be short, and 
decided to enhst men for twelve months, 
which, quite apart from anything else, 
was not nearly long enough to give 
them a disciphne and solidity approach- 

150 



MILITARY EXPERIENCES 

ing that of the King's soldiers. Wash- 
ington continuously protested, but in 
vain. He was always told that if these 
enlisted regulars were insufficient there 
was always the militia to fall back upon ! 
It is hardly too much to say that Lex- 
ington and Bunker Hill, or rather the 
false presentation of those events^ were 
among the worst misfortunes that ever 
overtook this country. The legend of 
the minute man, of the patriot rising in 
his wrath, reaching for his old gun from 
over the ancestral mantel, driving the 
mercenaries of George III before him, 
has done and still does an incalculable 
amount of mischief. Of course the 
farmer was patriotic, could on occasion 
shoot a redcoat or even give his life for 
the cause. But to suppose that the 
farmer, collectively as militia, could 
face British infantry in the field under 

151 



AHMS AND THE RACE 

any circumstances save those of surprise 
or irregular fighting is absurd. Even 
the French infantry could hardly do 
that, as Dettingen, and Fontenoy and 
the Plains of Abraham had demon- 
strated. The militia might help with 
numbers in such a blockade as that of 
Boston, or hold a breastwork against a 
frontal attack. Beyond that it was 
a nuisance. Washington himself de- 
clared that the militia was worse than 
useless and had been the origin of all 
our misfortunes. And he was surely a 
competent witness. 

After the War of Independence 
false economy continued to rule, with 
the same jealousy of a regular army and 
the same aberration as to the value of 
militia. At the time when Bonaparte 
became First Consul an era of expan- 
sion to the West opened, while Europe 

152 



MILITARY EXPERIENCES 

and the Atlantic witnessed gigantic 
struggles in which our trade interests 
were seriously threatened. We slowly 
drifted into war with Great Britain, 
relying meanwhile on the minute man 
chimera to meet the emergency when it 
should burst on us. Our army con- 
sisted of 6,700 men. 

Congress once more attacked the situ- 
ation by raising twelve months' troops, 
who were to be supported by a suitable 
backgi^ound of militia. In all over 
527,000 enrolments occurred, a greater 
number than that of the huge army with 
which Napoleon was then struggling to 
reach Moscow. Of these, 50,000 were 
regulars. The reader may be spared 
the pitiful, almost incredible, details of 
the administrative mismanagement into 
which Congress plunged these forces. 
It need only be said that Great Britain 

153 



ARMS AND THE RACE 

held her own along the Canadian border 
with 4,000 regulars, gradually increas- 
ing to 16,000, with some militia back- 
ing. Some of our performances on the 
frontier cannot be read without a blush. 
A small force of English dispersed our 
militia near Washington and raided the 
national capital with complete impu- 
nity. The cost of our military effort, 
one of the most disgracefully ineffective 
recorded in history, came to nearly 250 
milhons of dollars. 

The close of the war was marked by 
two redeeming incidents. One was the 
disastrous failure of an English force 
to carry Jackson's breastworks at New 
Orleans by frontal attack. The other 
was the discovery of that brilliant sol- 
dier Winfield Scott, who did something 
towards making our troops in the North 
efficient. 

154 



MILITARY EXPERIENCES 

For a few years after these illuminat- 
ing events Congress maintained the 
army on a slightly higher level. In 
1821, however, the old tendency asserted 
itself, and the army was reduced to 
6,000 men, and in another ten years we 
were paying the price. Indian troubles 
broke out in the Northwest and in Flor- 
ida. We had no troops available, and 
for lack of a very few battalions of reg- 
ulars we had to call out over 50,000 
militia, to spend thirty miUions and to 
face seven years of war and disorder in 
the Southeast. 

In 1846 came the Mexican War, 
marked by the same deplorable features 
as our previous enterprises, but in part 
redeemed by the brilliancy of our of- 
ficers and the high tactical quality of 
our scanty battalions of regulars. But 
it was not until the great Civil War 

155 



ARMS AND THE RACE 

that the United States attacked a mili- 
tary problem on anything like a large 
scale, and it is at that point that it is 
best to investigate and to draw lessons. 
The Civil War was quite unnecessary 
and preventable. The slavery question 
had to be solved. England had solved 
it as an economic proposition. Opinion 
in the United States, though inflamed 
on the surface, was visibly tending to- 
wards such a solution. But unfortu- 
nately every hothead in the country 
knew that there was no power in our in- 
stitutions to enforce law and order. 
Our army numbered less than 17,000 
men, widely dispersed, and with as 
much on its hands as it could possibly 
attend to. There was no force dispos- 
able to control a district that should be 
inchned to break away from central 
control. 

156 



MILITARY EXPERIENCES 

It was not necessary that the United 
States should be a militarist country. 
We did not need a million or two of 
soldiers, nor half a million, nor even a 
hundred thousand. If we had had just 
sixty thousand troops at that time, it is 
safe to say that no civil war could have 
taken place. With sixty thousand men, 
however widely dispersed, we could pre- 
sumably have collected two or three 
brigades with which to occupy Rich- 
mond, Charleston, and New Orleans 
when symptoms of rebellion appeared 
and long before a local militia could be 
even assembled by the secession leaders. 
The fact that the Government could 
police the country would have been so 
obvious that the Southern leaders would 
probably never have considered seces- 
sion, and that if they had the Southern 
officers would not have deserted their 

157 



ARMS AND THE RACE 

country for their state. Even had they 
done so, it would not have changed the 
situation. The rank and file, in 1861, 
stuck to their colors, and the only diffi- 
culty would have been to replace 40 per 
cent, of the officers, or to get along 
short-handed, a minor problem. 

In connection with the Civil War we 
find the same conspicuous incapacity to 
handle a military question that our 
elected bodies have shown so consist- 
ently and so disastrously in terms of 
human life and treasure. The gro- 
tesque and outrageous notion was put 
forward, though the military advisers 
of the Administration offered per- 
fectly sound advice, that 75,000 volun- 
teers enrolled for three months could 
do the business. It was a policy so 
ignorant, so inept, that sent so many 
untrained citizens to an unnecessary 

158 



MILITARY EXPERIENCES 

death, that it ahnost deserves to be 
called criminal. A few weeks sufficed 
to demonstrate the futility of that meas- 
ure, but the whole terrible length of the 
war was not enough to remedy another 
fundamental misconception that per- 
haps cost the country even more in 
terms of time, blood, and money. Reg- 
iments were organized as units, with no 
system of depots for training recruits 
and drafting them into the battalion at 
the front. All the experience of every 
country for a hundred years past over- 
whelmingly demonstrates that behind 
the trained unit at the front there must 
be the mechanism for keeping its ranks 
full. Instead of conforming to this 
standard we preferred, save for the not- 
able exception of the State of Wiscon- 
sin, to let seasoned units gradually get 
weaker and weaker, and to send our 

159 



ARMS AND THE RACE 

raw recruits to the fray, with raw of- 
ficers in raw regiments. 

There were reasons, unfortunately, 
for all these things — political reasons. 
And that is one more illustration of the 
evil of leaving military policy to the ex- 
clusive control of Congress. The fact 
is that no subject is more difficult in its 
range of historical, psychological, and 
technical factors, than the military art; 
yet by one of those strange hallucina- 
tions to which man is subject, there is 
none on which the layman feels so com- 
petent to pass an opinion. And the 
less he knows about it, the more drastic 
his opinion. It is only when he begins 
to dig in to the theoretical and prac- 
tical difficulties that surround the sol- 
dier that his views become more tenta- 
tive. 

Until we have persuaded Congress 
160 



MILITARY EXPERIENCES 

of this fact, until it has become will- 
ing to delegate some authority to 
boards of experts, as it might in ques- 
tions of engineering, sanitation, for- 
estry and so on, there is little hope of 
wiser views prevailing. But this is a 
digression, and we must return to the 
Civil War. 

Men fought bravely in the Civil War, 
and even skilfully when on the defen- 
sive. But on the tactical offensive there 
was little skill, save here and there in 
the final phases. Every army attack- 
ing in line tended to lose cohesion and 
resolve itself into a mob the instant it 
was called on to advance under fire. 
The Second Manassas offers what may 
be described as a fair average sample 
of this tendency, inevitable from the 
lack of training of the men, the com- 
pany commanders, the regimental of- 

161 



ARMS AND THE RACE 

iicers, the staff and the higher command, 
in their respective duties. 

At the Second Manassas we have on 
the part of Lee brilhant strategy; on 
the part of Lee's troops, really fine 
marching. Then came the tactical 
shock. On the second day of the bat- 
tie, after Pope had worn his army out, 
the Confederates advanced to force the 
decision. Longstreet's corps deployed 
on a front of about two miles, moved 
forward about a mile to a mile and a 
half, sweeping back such Federal forces 
as were in its front. But at the end of 
that advance, it had become a confused 
mass of troops, in which brigade and 
divisional organizations had been lost, 
and in many cases even regimental ones. 
On the sky line, as the troops moved to 
the attack, was a solitary house, and 
it acted as an irresistible magnet on the 

162 



MII.ITARY EXPERIENCES 

whole line. At that house one can 
trace the presence of men from almost 
every single unit of Longstreet's corps, 
except the reserve division (Ander- 
son's). In other words, as the result 
of a carefully planned attack, with 
troops in a state of high morale, all 
tactical cohesion was lost in an advance 
of a little more than a mile, and there 
was left something little better than a 
helpless mob. 

This illustrates very well why the 
battles of the Civil War were as a rule 
barren of results. It was the tactical 
weakness of the armies, their lack of 
cohesion, their inability to maintain for- 
mations, among other things, that pre- 
vented a real decision being reached on 
the battle ground. And this tactical 
weakness proceeded mainly from the 
fact that there was no solid instruction, 

163 



ARMS AND THE RACE 

based on carefully framed tactical 
theories, behind the regimental officers, 
the higher command, and the staff. To 
obtain tactical cohesion with even the 
best trained officers was a difficult 
enough proposition, as Fritz Honig 
had so clearly perceived at Mars-la- 
Tour. But with an armv in which the 
higher command and the staff had 
literally had no training at all, and the 
regimental officers nothing beyond 
some hasty and superficial barrackyard 
drills, what could be expected? In 
Longstreet's advance there was no staff 
control of any sort, while the brigadier 
generals seem to have occupied most of 
their time galloping around trying to 
find where the units of their brigades 
had got to ! In the upshot they, like their 
men, naturally reached Chinn's house ! ^ 

1 From Homer Lea's "Valor of Ignorance," I note 
164 



MILITARY EXPERIENCES 

It would not be difficult to pursue 
further this criticism of the armies en- 
gaged in the slow and deadly conflict 
of the Civil War. But the salient 
points have been made, and details 
would merely confuse the issues which 
will be presented to the reader in the 
next chapter. It will be best to turn 
now to the credit side of the Civil War 
and to see whether, in terms of military 
organization or art, there is anything to 
be entered in that column. 

The high morale and good fighting 
quahties of the American citizen pro- 
duced, as we have seen, some hard, if 
unskilful, fighting. Generals of great 
ability came forward, especially on the 
Southern side. During the last phase 

that over 6,000 oflScers were cashiered or discharged 
from the Union Army, while over 32,000 resigned! I 
have not verified these figures. — The lamentable busi- 
ness of the first Bull Run I have described in my 
"Bull Run— Its Strategy and Tactics." 

165 



ARMS AND THE RACE 

of the war Grant displayed military- 
power and intelligence for the North, 
while the handling of the Army of the 
Potomac showed a greatly improved 
technique in the system of orders and 
control. Yet in all this there was Httle 
more than a natural consequence from 
the conditions, containing no new in- 
struction. 

It was only in one respect that new 
instruction was to be derived from the 
war. This was in the last organization 
of the Army of the Potomac, now a 
rapidly acting and well controlled body, 
in which one corps was of special mo- 
bility because mounted. In the last 
campaign Sheridan's command does not 
play the part of a reserve of cavalry; it 
does not play the part even of an inde- 
pendent cavalry corps; but it is clearly 
a corps in the line of Grant's army, a 

166 



MILITARY EXPERIENCES 

corps somewhat reduced in fighting 
power but greatly increased in moving 
power. The high mobihty of Grant's 
army as a whole, with this special veloc- 
ity in one of its corps, is what enabled 
him, in 1865, to reach Lynchburg before 
Lee and to terminate the war. The 
relation of Sheridan's corps to Grant's 
army constitutes a new departure in 
the composition of armies, and our one 
solid contribution to the art of war. 

From the time of the Civil War to 
the present there are more lessons to be 
learned, but they need not affect the 
final argument. Our army learned 
many things in the Spanish war: at 
first the cost of unpreparedness ; then, 
in Cuba, how not to fight; later, in the 
Philippines, after a little experience, 
how to fight on a small scale. This was 
to the good as far as it went. New 

167 



ARMS AND THE RACE 

blood was poured into the army. 
Those who were behind the scenes did a 
lot of thinking. And presently army 
reform, under the wise and patriotic 
guidance of Mr. Root, began to take 
shape. We started in to catch up a 
century or so of military progress. 
Mr. Root created a General Staff, an 
institution still viewed with suspicion 
by the conservatives. An Army War 
College came into existence; and a re- 
formed Army school at Fort Leaven- 
worth. And all of these were indis- 
pensable foundations for the higher 
control and command of the United 
States army. But the greatest prob- 
lem of all was left unsolved, that of the 
creation of a real United States army, 
an army fit in its relation to national 
policy and purposes, adequate for all 
and any such emergencies as might 

168 



MILITARY EXPERIENCES 

reasonably be perceived on our political 
horizon. How such an army should be 
constituted is a question that must now 
be approached. 



169 



CHAPTER VIII 

OUR NATIONAL DEFENSE POLICY 

THE size of our army is inconsider- 
able. The last army list shows 
about 32,000 infantry — say three quar- 
ters of an army corps ^ — including the 
Porto Rico regiment. Our reserve sys- 
tem, which has Httle in common with 
those modeled on Scharnhorst's reforms 
a century ago, is reputed to be able to 
produce, in a national emergency, an 
additional 16 men! Then we have the 
militia. And the mihtia has been the 

1 The size of army corps and divisions varies ; the 
standards here adopted will be about 42,000 men to 
an army corps and about 12,500 to a division. The 
United States has no army corps; but does have, on 
paper, a faulty divisional organization of a little over 
20,000 men to the division. 

170 



OUR DEFENSE POLICY 

grandest asset of our public orators, 
since Lexington. As a plain fact, how- 
ever, it is reckoned that the physically 
fit and shghtly trained militia amounts 
to not over 80,000 men; while our mih- 
tary organization will remain an organi- 
zation for deliberate murder until 
things are so adjusted that a militia 
battahon shall get not less than three 
months under canvas before being 
sent to the front. And even at 
that . . .! 

The best things we have are our be- 
ginnings of a Staff, our Service Schools, 
West Point, and a body of capable of- 
ficers mostly of junior rank who know 
our weaknesses and could remedy them 
if they only got a chance. If we with- 
drew every infantryman from Panama, 
the Phihppines, Honolulu, Porto Rico 
and Alaska, and massed them together, 

171 



ARMS AND THE RACE 

we should still fall considerably short of 
a single army corps. Germany at this 
moment is reckoned to have 73 army 
corps in the field, and Germany is a 
smaller country than we are, a poorer 
country, and one for which the future 
opens less brightly. The army of 
Montenegro, a country that the State 
of New Jersey could put in its pocket, 
is quite the equal if not the superior of 
our own. Switzerland counts her men 
by the quarter and half million; while 
England raises armies a million at a 
time, in a very doubtful attempt to make 
up for a long period of neglect and de- 
ficiency. 

Now we have no problem in terms of 
millions confronting us; we can get off 
very much more cheaply than that. 
But our solution does require the vir- 
tual scrapping of our present so-called 

172 



OUR DEFENSE POLICY 

army, and taking a fresh start on a dif- 
ferent basis. To tinker with what we 
have now is merely pursuing the shut- 
your-eyes course of which Belgium has 
lately been giving such a lamentable ex- 
ample. Let us not tinker, let us open 
our eyes to facts, let us look around the 
world's horizon and consider what are 
the emergencies we should reasonably 
anticipate. And then, let us remodel 
our army to fit those circumstances. 

One thing is beyond controversy, 
which is that the policy of this country 
is non-aggressive in spirit or theory. 
But in fact, however, there is in it an 
element of aggression. This aggres- 
siveness proceeds in part from the Mon- 
roe Doctrine and in part from the eco- 
nomic push southwards which has al- 
ready been noted. We disclaim all 
aggressiveness and we honestly mean 

173 



ARMS AND THE RACE 

what we say, but in spite of ourselves 
our relations with Spanish America in- 
volve the increasing friction of two sur- 
faces one of which is expanding while 
the other is, in places at least, station- 
ary. Notwithstanding all this we 
should certainly dismiss from our minds 
aggressiveness when studying our mili- 
tary needs. We should be concerned 
only with defense, or questions that may 
be forced on us. 

It has been argued that Germany 
was a danger. In point of fact she was. 
Behind her diplomatic effort, for some 
years past, had been the supreme desire 
to obtain a naval base in the knot of the 
trade routes rising north towards Lon- 
don and New York from Gibraltar, the 
South Atlantic and Panama. For a 
brief moment she thought she could se- 
cure it at Agadir or Casablanca; for 

174 



OUR DEFENSE POLICY 

many years she watched covetously the 
West Indian Islands ; and her relations 
with Holland and Denmark presented 
no more difficult aspect than this latent 
question of the West Indies. Had 
Belgium owned Curasao, or St. 
Thomas, how sharply we should have 
appreciated the difference in the situa- 
tion to-day ! 

The danger was not merely lest Ger- 
many should acquire an Atlantic base 
from which to prosecute her designs; 
but it was thought by many that she 
might even undertake land operations 
against us. Unquestionably plans for 
such operations exist, though that does 
not of necessity prove much. It is, 
however, difficult to conceive any diplo- 
matic understanding or international 
grouping that would have permitted 
Germany to embark on such an enter- 

175 



ARMS AND THE RACE 

prise. On the other hand, the idea of 
a raid against New York or Boston 
could never even have arisen were it not 
so painfully obvious that we had no 
means for effective resistance. As- 
sume Germany diplomatically free to 
cross the sea and able to land her troops, 
— the rest would be easy. The ifs, 
however, are many; and in a moment 
we will consider coast defense and the 
navy in this connection. 

To dispose, first of all, of Germany. 
Clearly this is not the moment to attach 
too great importance to any danger 
which she may be supposed to present. 
It is too early (December, 1914) to 
foretell the nature of the settlement 
after the war; but it is not too early to 
foretell that the menace, such as it was, 
of Germany to the American continents 
is laid on the shelf for some years to 

176 



OUR DEFENSE POLICY 

come. There is therefore no need to 
measure up our requirements for de- 
fense on that standard. For questions 
far more serious arise in connection 
with other countries; and in deahng 
with them we shall, incidentally, more 
than cover the present case of Germany. 

Japan by her present course appar- 
ently holds out no prospect of a period 
of disarmament after the war. She 
therefore either fears Russia, or intends 
to profit from the depression of Europe 
to develop her position in Asia. To 
forestall Russia she has B.ve, ten or fif- 
teen years in which to break ofiP and or- 
ganize large sections of northern China. 
Or if that should prove impracticable 
she can turn to the Pacific, and there 
perhaps find more favorable opportu- 
nity in our weakness. 

The taking of the Philippines from 
1T7 



ARMS AND THE RACE 

Spain may be ranked among the worst 
military blunders committed by any 
American government — it is difficult to 
put the matter more strongly. It is a 
weak, ex-centric, military position, 
fundamentally indefensible against any 
strong transpacific power, but inevit- 
ably a magnet to draw troops and ships 
away from our shores. A popular 
clamor might at any time result in a 
weak Administration sending the bat- 
tle fleet from the Atlantic to Manila. 
And the result would be instantly to 
lose for us the incalculable influence our 
fleet has given us these last ten years in 
all North Atlantic questions; while at 
the same moment we should jeopardize, 
for no adequate purpose, the safety of 
that fleet at the other end of the world 
by attaching it to a base far too weak 
to give it the indispensable minimum of 

178 



OUR DEFENSE POLICY 

support. The islands are together 
larger than Italy; Luzon is about four 
times the size of Belgium, and so is 
Mindanao. To defend, by military 
means, Luzon, and Mindanao, and the 
other islands, requires a large force, say 
two or three army corps of 42,000 men 
each backed by a considerable native 
army. With such a force it might be 
reasonable to develop a great dockyard 
and arsenal on which a powerful fleet 
could rest securely and control the sur- 
rounding water.^ 

But all such calculations are loose 

2 The only valid defense of the Philippines is naval. 
This presupposes: 1st, a powerful fleet in the Pa- 
cific; 2d, the solid organization of naval bases in the 
triangle Panama, San Francisco, Honolulu; 3d, the 
fortification of Guam, whence our fleet could control 
the Japanese lines to the south. But these stages are 
successive, and we are far from being able to use 
Guam; while any attempt to fortify it would tend 
more than any other single act we could do to cause 
Japan to declare war. She would be perfectly right. 

179 



ARMS AND THE RACE 

and Utopian. The price is much too 
high. The game is not worth the 
candle. In practice we should inevit- 
ably cut below the minimum of safety. 
And even if we did not, even if we 
placed in the Philippines twice the force 
just stated, we should only be running 
double the risk, for in reality no naval 
and military force we can place in the 
islands can constitute a guarantee of 
local superiority. 

What can be done then? Unfortu- 
nately we cannot cut the loss. We 
have undertaken certain obligations; 
we are bound in honor to make an at- 
tempt to carry them out. If we can 
establish the Phihppines as an inde- 
pendent state, so much the better. If 
we can get an international guarantee 
of neutrality, for what it is worth, that 
might be helpful. Meanwhile we are 

180 



OUR DEFENSE POLICY 

bound to stay. But let us stay with a 
clear view of the danger of the situa- 
tion, and realizing that the Philippines 
are a source of weakness and not of 
strength. With such a view we should 
keep our naval and military forces in 
the islands down to the lowest level com- 
patible with day to day requirements. 
And whatever may happen in the fu- 
ture we must never permit our line of 
battle ships to be sent to so fatal a spot. 
Turning from the Philippines there 
are several other points at which Japan 
might strike, Cahfomia, Alaska, Hono- 
lulu; and yet others which, though of 
interest, will not affect the main argu- 
ment. Dealing first with California, 
there does not seem to be sufficient 
ground for an alarmist view; and some 
of the same arguments apply in this 
case as in that of Germany. ' It is not 

181 



ARMS AND THE RACE 

reasonable to suppose that Japan is in- 
capable of perceiving that an attack on 
California must be a losing game in the 
long run. Our bulk and economic re- 
sources are the undeniable guarantees of 
our eventual success. A reasonable 
policy should reject firmly the notion 
that we must provide for the defense 
of California from Japanese conquest, 
which means the creation of an armj^^ of 
at least half a million of men on a peace 
footing. All we need do is to remove 
the temptation we now offer Japan by 
being entirely undefended; and that 
would in all probability be accomplished 
if we were able immediately to concen- 
trate three army corps, say 130,000 men, 
on the Pacific coast. That should be, 
however, merely the advance force of a 
greater national army; otherwise even 
that number of troops might not sufiice. 

183 



OUR DEFENSE POLICY 

Turning next to Alaska the problem 
changes shape. The possibility of a 
Japanese attempt increases for a num- 
ber of reasons, among others the ad- 
vantage of seizing possession of mineral 
deposits which Japan lacks. On the 
other hand the contiguity of Alaska 
to Canada must act as a powerful de- 
terrent so long as the present alliance 
between Great Britain and Japan is 
maintained. The control of Alaska's 
long seaboard depends primarily on the 
command of the sea. But command of 
the sea is a precarious thing, apt to be 
discontinuous, particularly for a coun- 
try in our peculiar relation to two 
oceans. On the other hand the gar- 
risoning of Alaska so as to defend it in- 
tegrally is unthinkable. The solution 
appears to be the establishment of one 
strong fortified area on the coast, inex- 

183 



ARMS AND THE RACE 

tensive, so as not to demand a large gar- 
rison. This central position should be 
properly related to one or two minor 
ones suitable for the protection of the 
main trade routes. Then, with a few 
thousand troops in garrison, we could 
always hold the key to Alaska for a few 
months under adverse conditions, trust- 
ing to eventual relief from over sea. 

So far it has been possible to leave 
the navy almost out of consideration. 
But when we come to Honolulu we can 
do so no longer. And with Honolulu 
we reach the real bone of contention, 
the most serious military problem in our 
relations with Japan. For Honolulu 
in the hands of a hostile power is a di- 
rect threat to California and the Canal. 
To protect it, however, is a mixed naval 
and military proposition. The navy 
should be strong enough, that is to say 

184 



OUR DEFENSE POLICY 

our dreadnoughts should be sufficiently 
well supported in dockyard, arsenal, 
cruiser, flotilla, and local defense equip- 
ment, which at present is very far from 
being the case, to protect the Hawaiian 
islands. In addition there should be 
an adequate garrison for the defenses 
of Honolulu, which, it is generally un- 
derstood, is a matter of 20,000 men. 
To place 5,000, or 10,000, or even 15,- 
000 men in fortifications built to re- 
quire 20,000 men, is folly when our 
navv cannot control the sea, arid would 
not be very wise even if it could. Bet- 
ter keep troops at home than deliber- 
ately hand them over to the enemy. 
But this particular form of crime is as 
old as history and has all the respect- 
ajbility that comes from ancient and 
numerous precedents! 

To sum up our survey thus far we 
185 



ARMS AND THE RACE 

may say, that Germany may be dis- 
missed as setting a standard for our 
armaments, but that Japan necessitates 
our being able to place in the field im- 
mediately on notice being given: 

In California, 3 army corps. . .130,800 
In Honolulu and Alaska say. . 20,000 
To which add garrisons of Pan- 
ama and the Philippines say 23,600 



174,400 



And this is an estimate that makes no 
provision for either maintaining those 
numbers or expanding them; nor does 
it make allowance for the army's other 
duties. 

When we face south, beyond the Rio 
Grande, the problem once more 
changes character. The events of the 
last two years, and the whole current of 

186 



OUR DEFENSE POLICY 

our recent history, point to two grave 
possibilities: one is that we may have 
to make an expedition to the city of 
Mexico, the other is that we may even- 
tually have to pohce the whole of that 
distracted country. These are un- 
doubted possibiHties, and the sole ques- 
tion here is to reply, by the light of mih- 
tary Iiistory, to the question: What 
force should we require to deal with 
those problems? 

In the case of Mexico we cannot, as 
in the case of Japan, base our calcula- 
tion on anything that approaches a cer- 
tain Imowledge of the forces we should 
have to face. Precise elements are de- 
ficient; but we have analogies, prece- 
dents, probabilities; and on these we 
must build, not with certainty, but to 
the best of our judgment. 

We know, for instance, that one of 
187 



ARMS AND THE RACE 

the main difficulties of Lord Roberts in 
South Africa, and one that consumed 
numbers, was the keeping of about 1800 
miles of rail protected from guerrillas. 
We also know that there is something 
like 25,000 miles of rail in Mexico. 
If we were to multiply up on that basis 
we should conclude that we would re- 
quire between three and four milhons 
of troops to control Mexico. Fortu- 
nately, however, this is not just a sta- 
tistical question. For we also know 
that where the Boer had consistently 
high morale, the Mexican has unstable 
morale. It is clear from the recent 
fighting that under a good leader the 
Mexican may show up ver}^ well. We 
also know from Winfield Scott's expe- 
rience and from many other facts, that 
Mexican morale may be broken, and 
once broken is not easily recovered. 

188 



OUR DEFENSE POLICY 

We know about the topography of a 
country in which campaigning is diffi- 
cult. Our General Staff probably 
knows the real facts as to how many 
men the periodically budding candi- 
dates for the Presidential throne of 
Mexico have actually had in the field; 
but for the layman to estimate them 
from newsjDaper exaggerations is virtu- 
ally impossible. Out of such elements 
as these, somehow or other, an opinion 
must be formulated for what it is worth. 
Estimating the troops necessary for 
a march from Vera Cruz to Mexico 
City, together with the occupation of 
the Tampico district, one might say, in 
the first place, that the cheap and ef- 
fective way to do the business is de- 
cisively, that is in overwhelming force. 
When one considers the topography, 
the nature of the railroads between 

189 



ARMS AND THE RACE 

Vera Cruz and the capital (424 and 474 
kilometers), one inclines to the belief 
that from 50,000 to 60,000 regulars 
would be necessary for the advance 
and the occupation of necessary points. 
According to circumstances a greater or 
less number of line of communication 
troops, would have to be employed on 
the railroad from Vera Cruz to Mexico 
City; possibly a couple of militia divi- 
sions would suffice. On some such 
basis as that we should be reasonably 
certain of making quick work of an ad- 
vance to Mexico City, without great 
waste of time, money, or lives. It is 
quite possible, however, that the thing 
could be done with less force. It is 
even conceivable, with Mexican morale 
what it is, that a dashing general and 
15,000 men might do the whole business. 
But we are too powerful a nation to 

190 



OUR DEFENSE POLICY 

trifle with our responsibilities; a sober 
and safe estimate is wisdom in the long 
run. 

An expedition to Mexico City might, 
however, prove insufficient ; it might be- 
come necessary to settle down to a 
pacification of the whole country. 
This job would probably, and properly, 
be turned over to a Mexican mounted 
police as rapidly as such a force could 
be constituted; but that would take 
time. The problem would doubtless 
be less difficult in some parts of the 
country than in others. In any case 
we should be able to train militia and 
volunteer forces for a few months be- 
fore setthng them down to the work of 
keeping the peace in the districts we had 
succeeded in clearing up. So that the 
problem is one not merely of the num- 
ber of troops, but of the number of 

191 



ARMS AND THE RACE 

troops over three, six, nine months, and 
for either first line or second line duties. 

No data could possibly; avail to for- 
mulate a precise scheme to fit this prob- 
lem. But it seems reasonable to say- 
that we should require not less than 
three army corps of regulars in the field 
at the outset, with the possibility of a 
considerable increase within three 
months. Then we should require at the 
very least three army corps of volun- 
teers or militia, available in three 
months, with as many more available in 
six months. In all 130,000 regulars, 
rising to double; and the same force of 
volunteers but with a three months' 
time allowance beyond the regulars. 

Summing up once more, what do we 
find as a result. We require : 

For the garrisons of our pos- 
sessions, Alaska, Panama, 
19^ 



OUR DEFENSE POLICY 

Honolulu, Porto Rico, the 
Philippines, say one army 

corps 43,600 

For national emergencies, im- 
mediately available, 3 army 
corps 130,800 



174,400 

This force to be doubled in six 
months. 

In three months from a declara- 
tion we require three army 
corps of volunteers which 
should be in existence as mili- 
tia during peace time. Mili- 
tia 130,800 



Peace total, regular and militia.305,200 

This force to be doubled in six 

months. 

193 



ARMS AND THE RACE 

Doubling these forces would 
make available a war total, im 
six months, of 610,400 

To this figure must be added the 
Coast Defense troops. Coast defense 
trings us to an interesting point 
though one of minor importance. The 
Coast Defense theory, under which vast 
sums of public money have been and 
are being spent, is largely absurd. It 
is the one part of our military prepara- 
tions that is being over instead of un- 
derdone; and it is quite time that the 
matter were investigated out of its 
present dangerous groove. 

In the first place "Coast" defense 
means nothing at all. We can't defend 
our coast ; nor have we got to defend it, 
at all events, not in the terms of our 
Coast Defense theory. We have either 
to prevent a raid against one of our 

194 



OUR DEFENSE POLICY 

ports, in which case we are dealing with 
port or harbor defense at most; or else 
we have to meet the attack of an expe- 
ditionary force, the landing of which 
will not take place, for obvious 
enough reasons, at any of our ports, 
but in between ports, along some shel- 
tered strip of coast. Now to protect 
our coasts against such an eventuality 
and at all possible points by shore de- 
fenses, is ridiculous; the enterprise is 
gigantic. Half the effort entailed, 
directed into other channels, would 
leave us the greatest military power in 
the world. 

On the other hand the mere protec- 
tion of our harbors against a raiding 
cruiser or two should not be a very 
complicated or difficult matter. Even 
New York, our greatest port, could 
probably be defended with complete 

195 



ARMS AND THE RACE 

success against a raid without a single 
one of the formidable guns placed in 
the shore batteries. With such a nar- 
row and difficult channel a half dozen 
destroyers and a couple of mine fields 
with a few shore guns would make the 
entrance perfectly secure. 

In any case this question is one for 
experts; and for a mixed board of ex- 
perts, naval and military. It is worse 
than ridiculous to continue dealing with 
it on a basis of reassuring formulas 
about defending our "Coast," formulas 
that cloak false militaiy principles and 
the squandering of public money. The 
danger of an attack by a raiding cruiser 
on a port can be solved simply and 
economically by a competent board of 
experts. The landing of an expedi- 
tionary force can be dealt with in only 
one way, which is by an immediate con- 

196 



OUR DEFENSE POLICY 

centration of equal or superior num- 
bers of troops. To protect every land- 
ing place on our coast lines is a fantastic 
proposal. 

On the whole we may safely cut down 
our coast defense force by a half or 
more. Let us call it 10,000 men, and 
add it to the previous total. Adding 
this item we find that our national 
needs for defense amount in round 
numbers to 184,400 regulars and 130,- 
800 effective militia, on a peace footing. 
We further note that each force should 
be capable of being doubled as rapidly 
as possible in a national emergency. 

This brings us to the question of or- 
ganization, which in the present state of 
our army, is the most urgent question 
before the country. We have peace; 
the world may rest quiet for a few 
years; that is an opportunity not to be 

197 



ARMS AND THE RACE 

neglected for putting through the re- 
modeling of our army^. It is an im- 
perative national necessity; it is far 
more important, at bottom, than any 
mere increase of numbers. 



198 



CHAPTER IX 

ORGANIZATION 

SINCE the period when the de Gri- 
beauval-Bonaparte theories got 
into play, which is quite a while ago, 
the division has been the field unit of 
armies, for it combines the three arms 
and is tactically self sufficient. Our 
progressive country has recently caught 
up with this more than century old idea, 
thanks to the energy of our late Chief- 
of- Staff, General Wood. We have a 
divisional organization; the trouble is 
we have not got the divisions to put into 
the organization. For the present pur- 
pose it will be safe to ignore it, there- 
fore, and to proceed on the assumption, 

199 



ARMS AND THE RACE 

not so far removed from the fact, that 
the U. S. army has not got a divisional 
organization at all, and that we are 
starting with clear foundations: 
A division should consist of: 

Infantry : two brigades ; 

each brigade of six battalions ; 

each battalion of 800 men . . 9,600 

Cavalry: one battalion 800 

Artillerv: ten batteries ^ 1,200 

Engineer and other services. . . 800 

Total 12,400 

An army corps should consist of three 
divisions, and an additional cavalry 
division (or double division) of eight 
battahons, or 6,400 men , giving the 
total for an army corps of 43,600. Let 

1 The proportion and weight of batteries must be 
reconsidered after the close of the present war. The 
above is merely a formal estimate of no real value, 

200 



ORGANIZATION 

us now look more closely at the adjust- 
ment in the principal arms. 

Of infantry we require, on a peace 
footing, 12 battalions per division, that 
is for 12 divisions 144 battalions in all. 
But we require these immediately, that 
is in time of peace and at full strength ; 
while we require to raise as many more 
men by expansion in case of war. 
What is the best way to do it? 

The answer is to create a framework 
which we can expand, filling the ranks 
of two battalions per regiment in peace 
and of four in war. This can be accom- 
plished by creating a regimental organ- 
ization of five battalions, or a total of 
72 regiments, an increase of 42 on our 
present establishment. Battalions 1 
and 2 are the peace footing battalions ; 
3 is the territorial depot-battahon or 
half battahon; 4 and 5 are the reserve 

201 



ARMS AND THE RACE 

war battalions, non-existent in time of 
peace. In a great emergency even 
more battalions could be formed from 
the depots. The working of this sys- 
tem would be as follows : 

The third battalion is the regimental 
headquarters and depot, fixed conven- 
iently for recruiting in some large cen- 
ter of population; for it is essential to 
relate the army to the population, and 
not to keep it in out of the way comers 
as though we were ashamed of it. At 
the regimental headquarters would be 
centralized the administrative work of 
the whole regiment; the first training 
of the recruit; ^ the drafting of men to 
the field battalions according to re- 
quirements; the storing of the reserve 
equipment; the calling in and making 

2 This has drawbacks, as Colonel Morrison points 
out in his admirable little book, "Training Infantry"; 
but every system is a compromise. 

202 



ORGANIZATION 

ready the reservists if called up for 
service ; the forming of the 4th and 5th 
battalions in case of expansion in time 
of war. The depot battalion must be 
strong in its administrative and train- 
ing staff, but may without danger be 
quite weak in nimabers, as its function 
is to organize, equip, and feed the 
other battalions of the regiment but 
never itself to take the field. It there- 
fore gives elasticity to the regiment as 
a whole, taking up the slackness when 
recruiting is bad, while maintaining the 
1st and 2nd battalions to a proper level, 
and in war time the 4th and 5th. 

But how, it will be asked, are these 
fourth and fifth battalions going to 
come into existence? Where are the 
men and where are the officers coming 
from? The answer as to the men is 
that there will normally always be a 

£03 



ARMS AND THE RACE 

percentage of recruits working their 
way in; that this percentage of recruits 
will necessarily increase in war time, 
though it is not desirable that this in- 
crease be too great or too rapid. To 
the recruits must be added reservists. 

For some years the War Department 
and the General Staff have been pretty 
well agreed that reservists are needed. 
The question is, how to get them? The 
matter is largely one of bargaining. 
How long do you need to hold the sol- 
dier to the colors? Some answer as 
little as one year; General Wother- 
spoon, in his report as Chief of Staff, 
demands three. How much pay will 
induce the soldier to join for so long? 
How much will induce him to remain 
liable to rejoin, in an emergency, and 
over what period of years will he agree 
to be liable? A working compromise 

204 



ORGANIZATION 

of some sort has got to be established. 
Experience has proved well enough 
that, other things being equal, a soldier 
trained four years is measurably supe- 
rior to a soldier trained only three 
j^ears. The slightly trained unit, like 
the English territorial regiment or the 
slightly inferior American militia, can- 
not be used under three to six months, 
save possibly as line of communications 
troops in an emergency, though that is 
for many reasons unadvisable. This 
again is fundamentally influenced by the 
higher or lower standard of training set 
for the various grades of oflicers. Some- 
where, a working compromise between 
the quality and quantity of the soldier 
and the financial burden must be found. 
Assuming for the sake of the argu- 
ment the proposal of General Wother- 
spoon as a basis for bargaining with the 

205 



ARMS AND THE RACE 

enlisted man, we should have the regu- 
lars three years with the colors, and 
then passed along into a reserve from 
which they could be summoned for a 
term of years to rejoin in case of emer- 
gency. This reserve would come in to 
the regimental depots and, added to a 
proportion of recruits, furnish men 
enough for the 4th and 5th battal- 
ions. Then comes the question of the 
officers. 

One of the most emphatic lessons of 
all military history is that a regiment is 
about as good as its officers, a fact which 
our public has never realized. Our 
statesmen, indeed, have always been in- 
clined to act on the opposite assumption, 
and produced ghastly butcheries in con- 
sequence. The vital point in establish- 
ing the quality of an army is to get 
enough good officers to train the men, 

206 



ORGANIZATION 

and to lead battalions and companies. 
How are they to be obtained for our 4th 
and 5th battalions ? The best way is to 
have with the first three battalions, on 
peace footing, more officers than are ac- 
tually needed, and to keep a consider- 
able number of officers learning the 
higher branches of their profession at 
the Fort Leavenworth school and at the 
Army War College, who would natu- 
rally join the troops again if a state of 
war occurred. If, for example, the 1st 
and 2nd battalions had each of them 
eight companies (or four double com- 
panies) and on the calling up of reserv- 
ists cut down their companies to four 
only ; then four captains from each bat- 
talion could be passed back to the depot 
to take over the reservist companies as 
they were completed for the 4th and 5th 
battalions. If in peace time not less 

^07 



ARMS AND THE RACE 

than one captain and two lieutenants 
were detached from each battahon to 
the Fort Leavenworth schools, and if 
each colonel saw that every captain fre- 
quently handled a double company or 
even a half battalion, the disadvantage 
of doubling a captain's conmiand for 
war service would probably not prove 
very serious. 

Turning to the cavalry, the require- 
ment is to provide twelve battalions for 
divisional service, about as many more 
for scattered service, and four cavalry 
divisions of eight battalions each, in all 
54 battalions. Before dealing with 
their organization, however, it is better 
to recall with great emphasis the special 
effectiveness of Sheridan's corps in the 
Army of the Potomac. The conditions 
of campaigning in most parts of the 
American Continent are highly favor- 

208 



ORGANIZATION 

able to this sort of command. And it 
is no exaggeration to say that one army 
corps with a division of cavalry, trained 
in peace time to vianoeuver as a U7iit, 
would in many cases be more effective 
than two army corps with merely a few 
cavalry battahons brought together for 
the first time. 

Mounted riflemen are cheap and 
quick to train ; and for that reason well 
adapted as a model for the divisional 
cavalry of militia divisions. For the 
regular cavalry the dragoon, who is a 
mounted rifleman trained to the use of 
the sword, will answer our purpose 
best. For the militia it is not practical 
to attempt to create independent cav- 
alry divisions, nor in fact cavalry at 
all; and we must confine ourselves to 
enough mounted riflemen to complete 
militia divisional organizations. 

209 



ARMS AND THE RACE 

For the regulars we require, there- 
fore, 27 regiments, twelve more than at 
present. Each of these would be or- 
ganized like the infantry with a depot 
battalion or squadron, two field battal- 
ions, and a framework of officers and 
reservists sufficient to give at least one 
more battalion for war purposes. Each 
field battalion should have a battery of 
two mountain guns, two mountain 
howitzers, and machine guns; while 
each cavahy division should have at- 
tached to it not less than four batteries 
of field guns. Although the pro- 
vision made for cavalry is not on quite 
the same level as that for the infan- 
try, it is probable that the reserve 
and depot system, if efficiently handled, 
might turn out rather more troops than 
indicated above, while volunteering and 
the raising of rough rider organizations 

210 



ORGANIZATION 

would be of material service in furnish- 
ing a sufficient cavaliy arm. 

Artillery is the great auxiliary arm. 
To render proper service its numbers 
and material must be ascertained by the 
light of experience in proportion and 
relation to the other arms. This is a 
difficult problem for the best technical 
experts. It is not proposed to say any- 
thing further here than that the best 
proportions should be fixed, the best 
material should be obtained, and a 
proper reserve both of material and of 
ammunition should be maintained. 
The engineering and other minor serv- 
ices of the army will for similar reasons 
be left out of the argument. 

Coming back to the salient facts, we 
have one more which for importance 
must rank on the same level as the depot 
and reserve organizations of the army, 

211 



ARMS AND THE RACE 

and that is training. The highest 
trained army is the best. That train- 
ing is of troops, of company officers, of 
field officers and of the higher com- 
mand. And the higher branches of 
the art of war constitute one of the most 
intensely difficult branches of study in 
the whole field of human knowledge. 
Lack of training and ignorance of the 
higher leading of troops has cost more 
than one great nation in modern times 
some of the most bitter pages of its his- 
tory. 

Our new model army must not only 
be territorially distributed, but it must 
have proper instruction; and for that 
the minimum requirements are these: 
West Point should be enlarged and 
another military college should be 
founded. Some point in the West 
would seem indicated, and Colorado has 

2ia 



ORGANIZATION 

much to recommend it for this purpose. 
Between the ages of 26 and 32 a large 
proportion of junior officers should 
be sent to the Army Service Schools for 
either a short or a long course (one or 
two years) of advanced study. A pro- 
portion of officers obtaining high grades 
in this course should be sent, after re- 
turning to regimental duty for at least 
two years, to the Army War College at 
Washington, for a further period of ad- 
vanced study. The staff of these two 
institutions should be strengthened in 
every way possible, and made semi-per- 
manent. Our aimy administration 
must place its emphasis on high train- 
ing instead of sacrificing the thinking 
and organizing processes to blind rou- 
tine as it does at present. 

We further require camps of instruc- 
tion, or perhaps better still summer 

213 



ARMS AND THE RACE 

manoeuvers. Suitable ground should 
He acquired for the continuous training 
of officers and men in the handling of 
brigades and divisions both of infantry 
and of cavalry. It might even be ad- 
visable to have a second camp, on the 
Pacific Coast, for the assembling for 
periodic training of another division of 
infantry. In no other way can real 
efficiency be attained. Let those who 
doubt this study the almost incredible 
details of Bazaine's attempts to move 
his columns through the city of Metz, or 
of McClellan's farcical efforts to get his 
army up the Peninsula. A few well 
schooled Prussian staff captains could 
have handled the whole business with- 
out the least trouble. 

In the above sketch of a new model 
army a good many points have been 
left untouched. But it must be clear to 

214? 



ORGANIZATION 

the reader that this is nothing more than 
an effort to indicate the broad lines of 
a specific pohcy. Some details are 
clearly open to adjustment. Others 
may be assumed from the premises, for 
instance, that the organization of the 
militia and the training of its officers 
should be on lines corresponding as 
nearly as possible to those for the 
Regulars. To take another matter: if 
we form so many batteries of artil- 
lery, available within such a period, we 
must obviously be provided with the 
ammunition that shall make those bat- 
teries effective. In one way it seems 
needless to make the remark. Yet 
such is our tradition in such matters that 
it has its importance. 

I realize only too well the fate of a 
book like this in many quarters. It 

215 



ARMS AND THE RACE 

would not be difficult to write a biting 
criticism of it, nor to guess which editor 
might be most eager to print it. No 
great effort is required to imagine the 
eloquent indignation with which the 
pacifist orator will denounce it. The 
politician, who is arraigned in it, will 
naturally condemn it; or perhaps view 
it as an embarrassment; or, at best, a 
means for embarrassing his opponents. 
Unfortunately many of the public- 
minded, ignorant of history, war, and 
international politics, will not derange 
the systems of their minds by even at- 
tempting to understand it. Hostility 
and inertia loom large on the horizon. 
Yet many who read it will, I know, 
realize that facts carefully observed 
have been placed before them, from 
which only moderate and reasonable 
deductions have been drawn ; and for no 

216 



ORGANIZATION 

purpose save to serve the country. Let 
us hope that all who understand will 
support those few gentlemen who in 
Congress and elsewhere are striving to 
improve our national defenses. 

To say that war is stupid and wicked 
may be true ; most people nowadays are 
agreed on tliis point. But it does not 
dispose of the question. It is only in 
the kindergarten text that it takes two 
to make a quarrel, as every page of his- 
tory ancient and modem demonstrates; 
and we have some very recent cases. If 
war is stupid and wicked, to encourage 
others to make war by remaining de- 
fenseless is stupid, wicked and crim- 
inal. And to avoid that crime it is not 
necessary to threaten, it is not nec- 
essary to arm to the teeth. We have 
merely to raise our army to a stand- 
ard that will place it about on a 

£17 



ARMS AND THE RACE 

level with those of the second or third 
rate European powers, say somewhere 
between those of Holland and of Rou- 
mania. To imagine that this would be 
a departure from our old-time policy, 
that it would alarm Europe, lose us our 
moral power, and so forth, is cheap clap- 
trap for very ignorant and foolish audi- 
ences. It would, of course, have pre- 
cisely the opposite effect. It would 
show European statesmen that, unlike 
Belgium, we can face the issues of peace 
and war, and that if a grave problem, 
like that of Mexico, should be thrust 
upon us, we are capable of solving it, 
which now appears quite doubtful. 

There is at present an outcry that we 
should investigate the Army. Is it 
worth while, poor thing? It does its 
best; it generally has done what was 
possible under hopeless conditions. Its 

218 



ORGANIZATION 

feebleness is known to all and may be 
estimated at sight. What topsy-turvi- 
dom to investigate the innocent sufferer 
and to leave uninvestigated the source 
of all the evil, the body with w^hich Hes 
the responsibility for the army's condi- 
tion, that is Congress! There is the 
point at which investigation is neces- 
sary, and in fact urgent. 



THE END 



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